Description

Since the earlier twentieth century, literary genres have traveled across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes.
Literature may now be anything from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal--visual constellations in print and on screen, cinematic narratives, or electronic textualities that range from hypertext to Flash.

New technologies have left their imprint on literature as a paper-based medium, and vice versa. This volume explores the interactions between literature and screenbased media over the past three decades. How has literature turned to screen, how have screens undone the tyranny of the page as a medium of literature, and how have
screens affected the page in literary writing? This volume answers these questions by uniquely integrating perspectives from digital literary studies, on the one hand, and film and literature studies, on the other.

"Page" and "screen" are familiar catchwords in both digital literary studies and film and literature studies. The contributors reassess literary practice at the edges of paper, electronic media, and film. They show how the emergence of a new medium in fact reinvigorates the book and the page as literary media, rather than signaling their
impending death.

While previous studies in this field have been restricted to the digitization of literature alone, this volume shows the continuing relevance of film as a cultural medium for contemporary literature. Its integrative approach allows readers to situate current shifts within the literary field in a wider, long-term perspective.

Features

• Examines "remediation": the process whereby "new" media (digital media, augmented reality) define themselves by refashioning or reanimating "old" media (from painting to film), and these "old" media then in turn refashion themselves along the lines of "new" media.
• In a world full of hype about the "end of the book," this collection is admirably balanced, looking carefully at what is actually going on, what artists are actually doing in various media, "old" and "new," rather than getting pulled into sweeping futuristic projections.
• The best-known contributors are Samuel Weber and Katherine Hayles.
• The author is at Harvard this year, and is organizing a conference and followup volume on sound and media later this spring. She is in charge of a large reserach project in the Netherlands, with funding of a million euros, to examine how digital and "analog" media develop in "parallel tracks," not replacing but augmenting each other. Thus she is positioned to become an important voice in this field.

Reviews

"A state-of-the-art book. Understanding the effects of the rapid changes from a print culture to a digital culture is of major importance these days."-J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"A strong collection that is carefully organized around a clearly defined set of themes and interests. The volume poses questions of the always dynamic, transitional and 'feedback-looped' relationship between, on the one hand, paper and print-based forms, histories and archives; and, on the other, electronic media and textualities."-Simon Morgan Wortham, University of Portsmouth

Product Details

352 pages; 5 b/w illustrations; 6 x 9; ISBN13: 978-0-8232-3906-1ISBN10: 0-8232-3906-3

About the Author(s)