American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television

Author:   Heike Schaefer
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108487382


Pages:   324
Publication Date:   16 January 2020
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television


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Author:   Heike Schaefer
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.90cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.600kg
ISBN:  

9781108487382


ISBN 10:   1108487386
Pages:   324
Publication Date:   16 January 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of Contents

The quest for immediacy in American literature and media culture; Part I. Literary Immediacy and Photography: 1. The poet as 'exact reporter of the essential law': Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetics in the context of early photography; 2. 'To exalt the present and the real': Walt Whitman's photographic poetry; 3. The politics of paying attention: the romantic desire for immediacy; Part II. Literary Immediacy and the Cinema: 4. 'Living moving pictures': the thrills of early cinema; 5. 'Making a cinema of it': seriality and presence in Gertrude Stein's early literary portraits; 6. 'A novel like a documentary film': cinematic writing as cultural critique in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer; Part III. Literary Immediacy and Television: 7. Being there: television's aesthetics of immediacy; 8. For real? The critique of TV culture in the short fiction of Robert Coover and David Foster Wallace; 9. “Nothing happens until it is consumed': the remediation of TV images in Don DeLillo's novel Mao II; 10. Fiction in the age of television; Still in pursuit; Bibliography.

Reviews

'Media archaeology from the literary inside out: immediacy theory, scrupulously pursued from photography's transparent eyeball to the universal tube, from transcendentalism through cinematic montage to the ethos of tele-presencing. Emerson and Whitman speak to Stein and Coover, Dos Passos to DeLillo and Wallace, as never before across the very leaps of technological advance in an intermedial evolution of American poetics. Schaefer's adjustable lens enhances her panoramic traveling shot of this terrain with verbal close-ups that lock in an immediate - and indispensable - focus all their own. Entering a lively scholarly dialogue on competing media, her book canvasses literary voices that, even when those of familiar suspects, have unexpected news to bring. This engrossing study will be of interest equally to students of American literary history, media theory, the tradition of ekphrastic writing, and the video-inflected discontinuities of postmodernist narrative in an epoch of visual literacy.' Garrett Stewart, author of Transmedium and Cinemachines 'American Literature and Immediacy is at once grand in its aim of tracing the multidimensional concept of immediacy across visual media and a century and a half of American literature, and focused in its nuanced and compelling close readings of well-chosen case studies that represent some of the most intellectually earnest and formally ambitious literary responses to new visual media. I warmly welcome its significant contribution to literary studies and comparative media analyses and its impressive examination of a major concept in American culture - immediacy.' Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul University, Chicago and author of The Camera and the Press 'Media archaeology from the literary inside out: immediacy theory, scrupulously pursued from photography's transparent eyeball to the universal tube, from transcendentalism through cinematic montage to the ethos of tele-presencing. Emerson and Whitman speak to Stein and Coover, Dos Passos to DeLillo and Wallace, as never before across the very leaps of technological advance in an intermedial evolution of American poetics. Schaefer's adjustable lens enhances her panoramic traveling shot of this terrain with verbal close-ups that lock in an immediate - and indispensable - focus all their own. Entering a lively scholarly dialogue on competing media, her book canvasses literary voices that, even when those of familiar suspects, have unexpected news to bring. This engrossing study will be of interest equally to students of American literary history, media theory, the tradition of ekphrastic writing, and the video-inflected discontinuities of postmodernist narrative in an epoch of visual literacy.' Garrett Stewart, author of Transmedium and Cinemachines 'American Literature and Immediacy is at once grand in its aim of tracing the multidimensional concept of immediacy across visual media and a century and a half of American literature, and focused in its nuanced and compelling close readings of well-chosen case studies that represent some of the most intellectually earnest and formally ambitious literary responses to new visual media. I warmly welcome its significant contribution to literary studies and comparative media analyses and its impressive examination of a major concept in American culture - immediacy.' Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul University, Chicago and author of The Camera and the Press


Author Information

Heike Schaefer is Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany. She is a former Fulbright fellow, author of Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography (2004), and has edited several books and special issues, including The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (2019), Literary Knowledge Production and the Life Sciences (2017), and Network Theory and American Studies (2015).

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