digital futures of literature, theory, criticism, and the arts

Jonathan Franzen

Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence

Anthony Enns questions Kathleen Fitzpatrick's link between an anxiety about the displacement of male privilige and the fear of new media technology in postmodern fiction.

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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.”

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understanding. According to Walter Benn Michaels, this transformation of the intentional, and thus meaningful, sign into the unintentional, and thus meaningless, mark constitutes the ur-logic of postmodern thought, which is distinguished by its irrational privileging of affective experience over cognitive beliefs.

Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understanding. According to Walter Benn Michaels, this transformation of the intentional, and thus meaningful, sign into the unintentional, and thus meaningless, mark constitutes the ur-logic of postmodern thought, which is distinguished by its irrational privileging of affective experience over cognitive beliefs. In The Shape of the Signifier), Michaels suggests that through Bill Gray’s figuring of writing as “bits of human tissue sticking to the page” (Mao II 28), DeLillo not only depicts but effectively endorses a “disarticulation of writing from representation” (175). Is it possible, however, that both Fitzpatrick and Michaels err in identifying Don DeLillo’s ideological commitments with those of his fictional creations?

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (U of Chicago Press, 2003). Dubey challenges the conservatism of Morrison’s southern folk aesthetic on the grounds that it naively valorizes a premodern, black, southern, and female, oral tradition as an imaginary solution to problems associated with the alienating experience of modernization – particularly urbanization and print-based literacy.

For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (U of Chicago Press, 2003). Dubey challenges the conservatism of Morrison’s southern folk aesthetic on the grounds that it naively valorizes a premodern, black, southern, and female, oral tradition as an imaginary solution to problems associated with the alienating experience of modernization – particularly urbanization and print-based literacy. For Dubey, Morrison regularly succumbs to a “nostalgia for the literal” (178), and her desire for abolishing mediation makes her anything but a technological progressive. Rather, in a “postmodern romance of the residual” magic and orality provide the means for forging an imaginary black community that, in reality, remains riven with conflict due to the socioeconomic contradictions inherent to late capitalism.

Amy Elias’ ebr review of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism was published as part of the Senseless Resistances gathering.

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society.

Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society. As a professor of literature, I’m concerned about the not insubstantial number of incurious college students who resist using library databases to conduct research and who must be coerced, through specific assignments that require them to check out and read books, journals, and magazines, into exploring what’s available in the stacks at the university library.

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

Jonathan Franzen

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