New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature: From Cage to Connection [Hardcover]

How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age? Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis'sJ Rand Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psychothrough to David Foster Wallace'sInfinite Jest. Through these histories, the book charts the ways in which print-based postmodern writing at first resisted new mass media forms and ultimately came to respond to them.Casey Michael Henryis Carl H. Pforzheimer Postdoctoral Fellow in English at The City College of New York, USA.The question of a possible lineage between the work of Burden, Wallace, and Candy Crush is an intriguing and perhaps subver?sive one to ask. Henry's eagerness to make these connections speaks to the intellectual daring on display in this book. Orbit

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Inoperable Machine: A Media History of Late Postmodernism

Section One: The Tiny Box Wherein Everything is Solved: New Media Narrative, Communication Technology, and the Conversation Novels of William Gaddis
Problems in Two-Dimensions
Postmodern Issues / Good Intentions: New Media Art and Method
Even Agnostics Have Truth: The Verity of Bill Viola
Nauman, Burden, Jokes, and Cruelty
Two Sides of a Shadow: Stelarc, Chat Bots, and the Phantom Libido
Non-attribution: Corporeal Fluidity in William Gaddis's Conversation Novels

Section Two: Grooves on the Feeling Knob: Systematic Transgression in William T. Vollmann'sThe Rainbow Storiesand Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psycho
Framing Excess: An Introduction to Systematic Transgression
Sensory Movements: William T. Vollmann,The Rainbow Stories, and Emotional lc2