Literature in the Age of Visual Media

Abstract

Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology by Michael Wutz Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 279 pages Discourses of intermediality have of late formed a central preoccupation of theories of convergence put forward by such critics as Henry Jenkins and Lev Manovich. These theorists argue that formerly discreet such as newspapers, television, cinema, advertising, design, and the internet are increasingly produced in convergent strategies and patterns, enveloping consumers of visual/aural culture in a seamless lifeworld of mediated signs. This wall of signs was perhaps first consciously explored in modernist montage with its attempt read the over-determined and consumer-saturated landscape of urban signification. The film theorist Miriam Hansen has discussed how the medium of film created an altogether new sensorium for the masses, refraining sensory experience in the pre-packaging techniques of continuity editing, framing, lighting, and sound and in the process creating the language of classical Hollywood cinema. In the recent film The Pervert's Guide Cinema, Slavoj Zizek literally and forcefully inserts himself into sets of well-known films such as The Matrix and The Birds in order discuss their significance. It would appear that there is no meaning outside the audio-visual sign that V has come dominate contemporary However, Zizek's performative reinscription of cinema attempts reestablish the written logos that accompanies film and organizes its structures of signs. His performance redirects viewers of cinema cultures of reading which frame, analyze, and critique and its consumption. In the wake of the rise of audio-visual media, then, the question of the status of the text once again comes into focus. Are we dealing with an acute crisis of the disappearance of textual cultures or are we simply caught in the midst of having reconfigure textuality in the new context of signs with their enhanced degree of plasticity, tactility, and immediacy? With the growing dominance of visual and electronic media, it becomes increasingly apparent that we are moving into a new postprint environment in which print and literary culture, particularly the novel, is being subsumed into and replaced by various forms of new media. Michael Wutz's study Enduring Wards: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology offers, in the face of this trend, a substantial attempt rescue literary narrative from hasty declarations of the death of written culture, In doing so, Wutz's book demonstrates a sharp awareness of significant changes that have occurred in the environment since the birth of modernism and cinema. In a spirit akin that of the German theorist Friedrich Kittler, Wutz sets out explore modern fiction and its various interactions with, transformations of, and appropriations from new technologies (photography, the phonograph, cinema, computers) in order show how literature and print remain viable despite the massive onset of non-narrative technologies based on the visual image. A translator and scholar of Kittler, Wutz is Well set up make this argument; however, Wutz also veers sharply from Kittler's technological determinism, his postsubjective and posthumanist perspective, and his suspicion of the history of writing and the enlightenment. Wutz's study instead takes a fresh look at the physicality of print culture. discussing its various battles with competing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its powers of assimilation that bode well for its endurance in the new digital age (3). Indeed, as Wutz writes, to sing elegies bemoaning the demise of the Gutenberg Galaxy is be unmindful of literary fiction's role in the mediaverse of the twenty-first century (26). In a first significant move, the study recovers the technological elements that have accompanied print culture from the outset, exploring the media technological circumstances of its evolution. …