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

Description

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's J R and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho through to David Foster Wallace's Infinite 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 Henry is 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 subversive one to ask. Henry's eagerness to make these connections speaks to the intellectual daring on display in this book. * Orbit *