American Literature and Immediacy
Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television

Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

Heike Schaefer (Author)

9781108487382, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2020

324 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'General readers and scholars would feel informed of the immediacy of American literature needed in photography, film, and television, and understand the difference between the three media categories and why immediacy is needed to bring all three of them together.' Sydney Spencer, Communication Booknotes Quarterly

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.

The quest for immediacy in American literature and media culture
Part I. Literary Immediacy and Photography: 1. The poet as 'exact reporter of the essential law': Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetics in the context of early photography
2. 'To exalt the present and the real': Walt Whitman's photographic poetry
3. The politics of paying attention: the romantic desire for immediacy
Part II. Literary Immediacy and the Cinema: 4. 'Living moving pictures': the thrills of early cinema
5. 'Making a cinema of it': seriality and presence in Gertrude Stein's early literary portraits
6. 'A novel like a documentary film': cinematic writing as cultural critique in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer
Part III. Literary Immediacy and Television: 7. Being there: television's aesthetics of immediacy
8. For real? The critique of TV culture in the short fiction of Robert Coover and David Foster Wallace
9. “Nothing happens until it is consumed': the remediation of TV images in Don DeLillo's novel Mao II
10. Fiction in the age of television
Still in pursuit
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Media studies [JFD], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS]