The intersections of new media and literature have received much attention during the last two or three decades. Consider work by Lori Emerson, Dene Grigar, N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Janet Murray, Alondra Nelson, Jessica Pressman, and Alexander Weheliye, to name a few. Patrick Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics adds to this conversation a focused and original analysis of networks, which are notoriously difficult to define, let alone study from a cultural perspective. Interpreting everything from novels, films, and television (“linear forms”) to videogames and alternate reality games (“distributed forms”), Network Aesthetics identifies and examines five types of aesthetics: maximal, emergent, realist, participatory, and improvisational. This framework alone is a significant contribution to media and literary studies, and it further exhibits how the two fields inform each other. Since it will prove quite useful to an array of teaching and research projects across the humanities, I will do my best here to distill its nuance.Maximal aesthetics correspond with Edward Mendelson’s notion of encyclopedic narratives (such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and James Joyce’s Ulysses) but also with “network novels” (including Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon), where extensibility, reconfigurability, and the animation of the internet as a “metamedium” displace postmodern proclivities for fragmentation, pastiche, and metafiction (46). Maximal aesthetics demonstrate how the novel (as a form) is a process, not just a record; the novel is active and messy, not a static inscription or representation (72). As a metamedium of network novels, the internet foregrounds this mess and the affects attending it.Emergent aesthetics describe the relations that unfold when core components of a system interact and create complex phenomena (75). “Network films” (including Syriana) are not quite conspiracy films (like Parallax View and The Conversation) (77). Instead of following the lone detective or framing action around an individual and rather than assuming some hidden order, they position networks as mysteries running on accidents and limited perspective (77–79, 101–2). Not only do network films generate worlds through links and uncertainty, but they do so without the need for narratives of escape or aesthetics of transcendence.Realist aesthetics are less about mimesis and the everyday and more about how information and communications technologies are investigative tools for interpreting environments (133). The effect, at least via “televisual networks” such as The Wire, is a state of simultaneous investment and complicity. Participants care about their involvement in networks, yet also wrestle with the oppressive effects, including betrayal, suicide, and racism. As Jagoda suggests, The Wire renders networks sensible while manifesting a tragic sensibility, without a hint of closure. At once realist and romantic, televisual networks are ultimately about responsibility, not optimism or defeat (134–38).Participatory aesthetics do not treat networks as monolithic structures (146). They are not premised on modeling or simulation either (155). Instead, they are about access and actual connection. Here, “network games” (including Between and Journey) prompt player awareness of interdependencies (178). And yet these games rely on quasi-anonymous interactions. Participatory aesthetics slow down relations and demand reflection, animating situations where players are intimate strangers (179).Finally, improvisational aesthetics shift networks from objects of inquiry to categories and practices for creating knowledge (185). Alternate reality games (ARG) are provocative in this case. They proliferate media and community, and mediation becomes an active substance of play and lived social reality (189–91). The line between games and everyday life, and also designers and players, is blurred (193–34). Improvisational aesthetics are thus “untimely.” They brush against 24/7 networked productivity to enable, if not encourage, tactical performances and relations (216–19).Jagoda’s five-part framework is articulated with what he calls a “network imaginary”: “The complex of material infrastructures and metaphorical figures that inform our experience with and our thinking about the contemporary world” (3). These infrastructures and metaphors shape interpretation by emphasizing the politics and aesthetics of networks, and Jagoda attends regularly to the affects and sensibilities of his primary sources. Network Aesthetics never coldly treats its material, and the close readings—no matter what the medium or chapter—are rich and engaging. In contrast with most macroanalytical approaches to networks, Jagoda’s critiques are immanent. As such, the book stresses ambivalence, a type of “deliberate intensity” against adopting avant-garde aesthetics or opting out of networks (224–25). I am looking forward to seeing how this position and its framework influence future work in media and literary studies. For now, I have one question: How do paradigms of entanglement engage those of ambivalence? If, as Jagoda suggests, the latter privileges uncertainty, patience, and dissatisfaction from within networks, then might the former, following scholars such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, assume responsibility for the lines we draw, or the binaries we produce, through those networks? I ask this question because entanglements compose a welcome refrain throughout Network Aesthetics, especially when Jagoda discusses realist, participatory, and improvisational aesthetics. Even though various chapters of the book demonstrate thoroughly why entanglement (as a paradigm) matters for studies of networks, the coda (“After Networks”) underscores ambivalence. I thus finished the book wanting to hear more about the key differences between ambivalence and entanglement in the analysis of literature and media.Of course, the word transmedia (echoing Henry Jenkins) inevitably comes to mind whenever networks are mentioned. Although it is not a term Jagoda uses often (he juxtaposes it with the term medium specificity in his introduction), Jan-Noël Thon’s Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture provides a “toolbox” or heuristic for analyzing narrative across media (6, 264). Thon’s approach invests, through a representational model of argumentation, in the meaning of transmedial and how it is (or should be) applied to scholarly studies of narrative, while Jagoda is more concerned, via a correspondence model of analysis, with the forms, effects, and affects of transmedia experience. Building on research by Marie-Laure Ryan, Thon proves quite meticulously how the narrator is a transmedial formation (166). Like Jagoda, he integrates a variety of media and genres into his scholarship, including graphic novels (such as Charles Burns’s Black Hole and Art Spiegelman’s Maus) alongside films (such as Run Lola Run and eXistenZ) and videogames (such as Dragon Age and Amnesia). He also combines research on transmedia with medium- and work-specific strategies.Perhaps most interesting to readers of American Literature are Thon’s arguments about intersubjective construction, perception, and attribution in narration. He highlights how audiences “fill in the gaps” of narrative representation but also ignore narrative elements to imagine “storyworlds” (69–70). He returns often to the transmedial phenomenon, and not just the content, of interpretation, including who perceives as well as narrates a given storyworld (220). This raises some intriguing questions about differentiating between means of representation (such as audio, video, text, and images) and their sources (such as narrators, characters, and authors), especially when the two are not contingent (150–52). It also raises some concerns about reliability, including the reliability of networks and networked media (164).Returning, for instance, to the persistent uncertainty of Jagoda’s aesthetics, how do we understand the agency of networks and new media today? How do we articulate responsibility for them and their effects? How do we trust them? Thon suggests that the practices of adaptation as well as “medial” and “conceptual expansion” are promising for future work on reliability (327–39), and I imagine that interface analysis and design for consent are too. Whatever the eventual destination of network studies, both Network Aesthetics and Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture provide critics of literature and media with foundations to get there.