Gloss on Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence

Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production.

Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production. Promising new authors, particularly attractive young women, are marketed as celebrities and “can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing.” Like DeLillo and Pynchon, Lessing believes that writers must resist much of televisual culture, not least because the exposure and public access it demands intrudes upon and disrupts the solitary “imaginative space” of literary production. “If a writer cannot find this space,” Lessing warned in her Nobel Lecture, “then poems and stories may be stillborn.”