The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Abstract

Reviewed by: The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo H. Aram Veeser Jeffrey R. Di Leo, The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2019. "Crisis? What crisis?" To Jeffrey Di Leo, author of The End of American Literature, the plummeting of jobs in Humanities is no crisis. It's not as though anyone's house has burned down. No one has lost all his/her possessions. Let's be reasonable. "A series of unfortunate situations warrants a drink, whereas a series of 'crises' tells us it's time to get drunk" (142). Crisis journalism, even in the staid Chronicle of Higher Education, willfully distorts reality. "Or does 6,000 articles in one journal alone dealing with higher education's crisis seem reasonable to you?" Written (with one exception) as editorials for the American Book Review, the thirty-six essays are a transcript of what caught the attention of one cagey, entrepreneurial, philosophical writer, a writer who comes into focus here as a sort of cross between Immanuel Kant and Jerry Seinfeld. Di Leo comments on the end of the book, of editing, of slow reading, of stamped letters, of telegrams, of bibliopalace [End Page 369] bookstores. He remarks on the creation in Texas of a bookless library, the volcanic increase of self-published books, the almost complete decline of non-corporate book reviewing, the metamorphosis of literary editors into business managing editors, the disappearance of warehouses storing tons of books, and the evaporation of the brick-and-mortar bookstores to which those books were trucked, with the few remaining bookstores easily mistaken for the gift shop at Graceland. He writes of the invention of the Espresso Book Machine ("the mother of all printers" that prints Ulysses on demand in four minutes), of starfuckers who founded magazines and set conditions for electing celebrities-as-world leaders. Wildly diverse in content, the book's inner logic is iron clad. Di Leo tries hard to answer the monumental riddle of the present: "how it fundamentally changes our relations is yet to be determined" (173). Di Leo is a prominent, self-questioning soothsayer who dares to guess what those changes will be. He is provoked, excited, amused, and troubled by the mists that conceal any conceivable future: "I worry about our nation's push to American greatness." Espresso Book Machines were heralded as the greatest innovation since Gutenberg. In the end only 500 were sold. Di Leo is circumspect: "an exciting pitch but still pale in comparison to the one Don Draper did for Hershey Bars." While he has worked exclusively on behalf of academic, indie, art-house, and small presses, he still allows that "there may yet be some justice in a publishing world over-run by neoliberal aesthetics and corporate greed." Disillusioned, he is less despairing than bemused. Other essays in this book cover the ingenious efforts of creators who turn unpredictability into art. One conceptual art piece urges prominent authors to place their writing in escrow for 100 years, only then to be shown to readers. Mischievously, Di Leo asks, What if this project had been started a century ago? Wouldn't we be disappointed when excitedly we tore open the long-sequestered best-sellers of Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington? Hmmm. "Not worth the wait," Di Leo concludes. These authors, the most popular of their day, would be a complete bust upon their unveiling in 2015; all the more so the great film of that year, Birth of A Nation, based on a laudatory novel about the Ku Klux Klan. Unveiling that film today could mean only outrage and rioting. By contrast no geniuses of 1915 would be in the time capsule. Lawrence, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf—all were unknown and easily disregarded. And what if The Metamorphosis or Ulysses had gone into the black box? Di Leo is horrified by the possibility: 20th-century culture would have been diminished by half. The quest to anticipate the future makes Di Leo wary, self-conscious, and very funny. "Corporate publishing waits for no one—not even philosophy!" he confesses, wryly recalling his...