Writing at the Limit

The Novel in the New Media Ecology

Daniel Punday

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780803236462
• eBook ISBN: 9780803240810
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While some cultural critics are pronouncing the death of the novel, a whole generation of novelists have turned to other media with curiosity rather than fear. These novelists are not simply incorporating references to other media into their work for the sake of verisimilitude, they are also engaging precisely such media as a way of talking about what it means to write and read narrative in a society filled with stories told outside the print medium.
By examining how some of our best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday offers an enlightening look into the current status of such fundamental narrative concepts as character, plot, and setting. He considers well-known postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, more-accessible authors like Maxine Hong Kingston and Oscar Hijuelos, and unjustly overlooked writers like Susan Daitch and Kenneth Gangemi, and asks how their works investigate the nature and limits of print as a medium for storytelling.
Writing at the Limit explores how novelists locate print writing within the contemporary media ecology, and what it really means to be writing at print's media limit.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Rhetorical Constructionof Media Ecologies
• 1. Multimedia Moments Old and New
• 2. Story, Discourse, and Circulation
• 3. Defining the Vocation of the Novel throughNarrative Elements
• 4. Writing Beyond the Media Limit?
• 5. Negotiating Public and Private Spaces
• Coda: Connection through Limits and theMyth of Media Fullness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index