Enduring Words

Michael Wutz seeks to recuperate the literary novel in a post - print world by enhancing our sense of its place - the complexity as well as the security of its niche - within the digitally expanded 'media ecology.' He unfolds a fine-grained historical analysis into photographic, phonographic, cinematic, computational, and digital components. Dwelling on the relays by which these technologies have inscribed themselves on literary texts, Enduring Words makes a number of surprising and illuminating connections. - Bruce Clarke, author of Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems ""Enduring Words is an extraordinary assessment of print culture and its offspring, the modern novel. It navigates the history of technology, the history of the modern subject, biopolitics, the history of science, and the cognitive sciences. For Wutz, fictional narrative offers the 'best possible model' for what will emerge as a truly electronic art form. His is a much more sophisticated and optimistic take on literature's role in our electronic future, one that opens up new avenues for future research in both literary and media studies."" - Klaus Benesch, author of Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance ""For those skeptical, despairing, or merely curious about the novel's survival in the age of multimedia comes the welcome news of Enduring Words. With expert precision, Michael Wutz explains how the novel flourished and became even more insistently itself by assimilating techniques developed by revolutionary aural, visual, and digital technologies - the phonograph, the photograph, the silent, the talking, the color, and the animated film, the computer - without abandoning its own print culture. Enduring Words is a must read in every sense."" - Maria DiBattista, author of Imagining Virginia Woolf and Fast-Talking Dames