Details

Subject(s)

• American literature—20th century—History and criticism [Browse]
• American literature—21st century—History and criticism [Browse]
• Space and time [Browse]
• Motion pictures and literature—United States [Browse]
• Television and literature—United States [Browse]
• Literature and photography—United States [Browse]

Series

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 184. [More in this series]

Summary note

The search for immediacy, the desire to feel directly connected to people or events, has been a driving force in American literature and media culture for the past two centuries. This book offers the first in-depth study of literary immediacy effects. It shows how the heightened reality effects of photography, film, and television inspired American writers to create new literary forms that would enhance their readers' sense of immediate participation in the world. The study combines close readings of Emerson, Whitman, Stein, Dos Passos, Coover, Foster Wallace, and DeLillo with detailed considerations of visual media to open up a new perspective on literary innovation and the ongoing cultural quest for increased immediacy. It argues that we can better understand how American literature develops when we consider experiments with literary form not only in literary and cultural contexts but also in relation to the emergence of new media, their immediacy effects, and the larger changes in social life that they manifest and provoke.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Dec 2019).

Contents

• Literary immediacy and Photography. The Poet as "Exact Recorder of the Essential Law": Ralph Waldo Emerson's Poetics in the context of early photography
• "To Exalt the Present and the Real": Walt Whitman's Photographic Poetry
• The Politics of Paying Attention: The Romantic Desire for Immediacy
• Literary Immediacy and Cinematography. "Living Moving Pictures": The Thrills of Early Cinema
• "Making a Cinema of It": Seriality and Presence in Gertrude Stein's Early Literary portraits
• "A Novel Like a Documentary Film": Cinematic Writing as Cultural Intervention in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer
• Literary Immediacy and Television. Being There: Television's Aesthetics of Immediacy
• For Real? The Critique of TV Culture in the Short Fiction of Robert Coover and David Foster Wallace
• "Nothing Happens Until It Is Consumed": The Remediation of TV Images in Don DeLillo's Mao II
• Fiction in the Age of Television
• Still in Pursuit.

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ISBN

9781108766630 (ebook)

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