Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski

Abstract

Remember those dire, premillennial pronouncements about the alarming marginalization of reading and writing in our increasingly visually oriented, digitalized Internet era? Or the claims that the ascendancy of visual media—most notably cinema but also television, video, and photography—had eclipsed the novel as our culture's preeminent means for modeling and interpreting contemporary experience? Or the related insistence that the Internet, hypertext, and other new forms of electronic writing capable of combining text, sound, and image had already made old-fashioned print-bound books, with their cumbersome physicality, increasingly unlikely to survive within the global village's electronic system of communication, with its bewildering proliferation of lingoes, databases, and channels?