Reviewed by: American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television by Heike Schaefer Kathleen Fitzpatrick Heike Schaefer. American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television. Cambridge UP, 2020. vii + 311 pp. In American Literature and Immediacy, Heike Schaefer considers the development of American literature since the latter half of the nineteenth century through its participation in “American culture’s ongoing quest for immediacy” (27), which she defines as “an actual or imagined relation of direct contact” with the represented world (8). This quest for immediacy was heightened across the period by a series of new visual media forms—Schaefer focuses on photography, film, and television—that promised to pull the viewer into the scene, thus altering the “perceptual habits and aesthetic expectations” (5) of consumers of American popular culture. Literature, Schaefer argues, was no mere bystander, but rather an active participant in this transformation of the American sensorium. Schaefer’s analysis of the relationship between literature and newer media forms reimagines American literary history through the lens of comparative media studies, revealing the ways that authors from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries made use of the representational strategies and aesthetics of newer media forms in establishing their own sense of what literature could and should become in a rapidly changing culture. Schaefer argues that this relation between literature and new media is not one of belatedness, nor of rejection, but rather rests on the notion “that the effort to generate ever new reality effects has sparked the innovation of new literary techniques and forms, and that a common strategy American writers have used since the nineteenth century to create texts of greater immediacy has been to study and rework the reality effects of emergent media” (3). This quest for immediacy, of course, exists in mutual tension with mediation itself, particularly with the ways in which techniques of mediation are often foregrounded, making visible the work that producing immediacy requires. Building on and advancing Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of the dual logic of mediation, Schaefer suggests that “because we enjoy the feeling of immediacy, we are willing to ignore the mediated quality of our experience” (9). But it is also true that we enjoy that mediated quality, as there is a pleasure in spotting and understanding the techniques through which the feeling of immediacy is crafted. Calling attention to technique, at the very same time that technique is used to generate a feeling of immediacy, produces a kind of self-reflexivity (and at times self-reflectiveness) [End Page 596] between the form and the content of literary forms that are in dialogue with their media counterparts. Schaefer engages throughout with both the specific affordances of the emerging media forms and the ways those affordances were understood as they became part of the popular imaginary. By looking at the discourse around new media over the course of the long twentieth century, Schaefer traces how modernist literary innovation developed at least in part through its connections to mass culture, rather than through an elitist refusal of it. As Schaefer argues, “The emergence of new media significantly affects literary practice because they introduce new immediacy effects into media culture that transform how writers and readers understand the relation between reality and representation and what they expect of an aesthetically mediated experience” (20–21). The resulting formal and thematic experimentation focuses on literature’s dialogue with, rather than opposition to, new media forms. However, some of the connections and emulations that result in new literary forms bear deep critique of media culture, adapting the new forms’ devices in order to demonstrate their less salutary effects. This particularity remains a bit underexplored in Schaefer’s history. For instance, in thinking through John Dos Passos’s explorations of film’s dynamic style and the ways he reworks it in Manhattan Transfer, she acknowledges his conviction that “the discourses and practices of consumerist mass culture, in particular, contribute to a capitalist hollowing out of humanist values and democratic practices” (147). Yet she subordinates this cultural critique of new media forms to the opportunities they create for literary experimentation. As...
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