Literature in Contemporary Media Culture
Technology - Subjectivity- Aesthetics
Editors
How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over the last decade has charted the impact of new technologies on human conduct. It explores how changes in literary production, distribution, and consumption can be correlated to changes in social practices more generally. And it examines how (and if) contemporary media culture affects our understanding of literary aesthetics.
Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.
Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures, 2] 2016. xiii, 265 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Series editor’s prefaceRoger D. Sell
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Acknowledgements
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List of contributors
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Introduction: Technology – Subjectivity – Aesthetics: Three perspectives on contemporary media cultureAnders Skare Malvik and Sarah J. Paulson
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part i . Technology
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chapter 1. From acoustic trace to information materialized: Archival poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s SoliloquyAndrew Peart
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chapter 2. Reading animated poetry between pragmapeia and prosopopeiaAnders Skare Malvik
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chapter 3. Words with cybernetic senses: Questions of multimodality, programming and liveness in digital poetryMette-Marie Zacher Sørensen
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chapter 4. Media ecology in the literal sense: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of LeavesKnut Ove Eliassen
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part ii . Subjectivity
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chapter 5. Roman and the mediality of biographical writingAnders Skare Malvik and Kristoffer Jul-Larsen
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chapter 6. Mediatization, self and literature: Fictionality as a means of self-fashioning in Bret Easton Ellis and (Claus Beck-) NielsenStefan Kjerkegaard
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chapter 7. The literary magazine and the making of a writer: Gunnhild Øyehaug in the space of possiblesSissel Furuseth
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part iii . Aesthetics
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chapter 8. Staging the present: Performativity and performance in Carl Frode Tiller’s EncirclingSarah J. Paulson
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chapter 9. Refigurations of Walden : Notes on contagious mediationAsbjørn Grønstad
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chapter 10. Transaesthetic temporalities: Ekphrasis and the poetics of decelerationAsbjørn Grønstad
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chapter 11. Showing seeing across media: The contemporary novel as visual eventSarah J. Paulson
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Index
“
Literature in Contemporary Media Culture is the first collection I’ve seen that rigorously applies media theory from Friedrich Kittler and Gilles Deleuze to Katherine Hayles and younger theorists, to specific recent literary works, both poetry and fiction. Its three-fold division—Technology—Subjectivity—Aesthetics--makes it possible to see just how thoroughly the literary field has been transformed. Studying the actual processes of authorial production in the new media climate – whether in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle or in Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial Soliloquy – Sarah J. Paulson and Anders Skare Malvik have put together a superb set of essays, transformative in their thinking. Literature, the collection argues persuasively, shows no signs of going away: it is the understanding of literature that must change.”
Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
“Against the apocalyptic suspicion of some pundits that literature has been made irrelevant by the explosion of new digital forms and formats, the crisply well-informed essays in this collection beg to differ. They show that text-based practices are by no means fuddy-duddy antiques but rather the privileged spot for viewing the tectonic stresses that computation places on art and letters. Anyone interested in understanding the cultural life of the new millennium will find instruction, delight, and a long menu of things to consider in this book.”
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen & Maria Lassén-Seger
Edwards, Sarah
2023. On the Cusp of the Post-Internet Essay: Lisa Robertson’s Nilling (2012). CounterText 9:3 ► pp. 339 ff. 
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
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Subjects
Communication Studies
Literature & Literary Studies
Main BIC Subject
DSA: Literary theory
Main BISAC Subject
LIT000000: LITERARY CRITICISM / General