New Media

Abstract

All media was once new media. This truth often gets lost in the discourse and scholarship of the phenomenon. While “New Media” can be defined as those forms that allow for user interactivity, and while that distinction can seem like a relatively recent development, there are a number of examples that prove that user-driven participation and innovation have been a form of nearly every emergent media. The literatures of, from, and about the U.S. South capture these stakes of media production or consumption, new or otherwise. For example, Charles Chesnutt outlined the stakes of the print media to manipulate public sentiment and insight violence in his The Marrow of Tradition (1901), which was based on the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. Scholar Julian Murphet has outlined in his Faulkner’s Media Romance (2017) how the rise of various media technologies shaped William Faulkner’s works. Flannery O’Connor made the newsreel a central feature in her short story “The Displaced Person” (1955). Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (2010) is awash in Dolly Parton’s music, glossy magazines, the advent of MTV, and the influence of television news on the characters’ lives. These are only a few examples of the myriad ways that the appearance of new media forms has shaped literatures of the region, and there is room in the scholarship about southern literature to expand and deepen these connections.