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  • Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology
  • Hila Shachar
Wutz, Michael . Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 304 pp. $49.95.

It has become a cliché to assert that the literary novel has experienced a battle for survival in the contemporary climate of the digital age and technological innovation. Along with the announcement of "the death of the author" came a similar declaration that literary narrative is experiencing a slow decline in the face of competing media. Film, photography, computers, and other media are often pitted against the printed word, in a logic of replacement where new technology replaces older forms of expression. In contrast, Michael Wutz's Enduring Words suggests a far more optimistic and complex relationship between literary narrative and other media. Wutz's analysis [End Page 382] proposes that the novel not only survives in a post-print world but is also re-imagined in ways that secure its lasting role as a significant form of expression.

What underpins Wutz's study is the argument that literary narrative has endured in a post-print world through the shifting of its function from a source of transmittance of data and information to what he calls an "extension of thought" (20) central to autonomous human subjectivity. In other words, when faced with competing media forms that can store and convey data, knowledge and information in vaster quantities and superior ways, the novel's function has become more intimately linked with the expression of an individual human subjectivity and interiority, forming its specific cultural niche. Such an argument may be inherently problematic for those who subscribe to a more postmodern conception of identity that questions the very idea of an interior or individual subjectivity. However, Wutz's study is neither an endorsement nor a deconstruction of the Humanist subject, but rather, a lucid exploration of how such a subject has become aligned with literary narrative and shaped by various technologies such as the photograph, the typewriter, the phonograph, the computer, and the cinema.

Within this critical context, Wutz gradually unravels how literary narrative has become defined as a meditative mode that is contrasted with the speed of technological information and consumer culture. Wutz writes that

print narrative can offer a time horizon and thinking mode radically different from that of postliterary forms of information flow and consumer culture. If acceleration, as Paul Virilio and Derrick de Kerckhove have variously shown, is the defining criterion of the present,...stories in print can provide both temporal and temporary retreat from such unrestrained velocity.

(25)

If, as Wutz argues, technology has "nudged narrative into its meditative niche" (25), his exploration of its shifting meaning highlights the idea that it has also nudged the literary author to reconsider his/her authorial identity and medium of expression—a process that Wutz explores through his detailed analysis of the works of Frank Norris, Malcolm Lowry, and E. L. Doctorow.

Wutz has structured his study through eight chronological chapters that engage with these authors' works in detail. The first three chapters on Norris are a thought-provoking read, analyzing the relationship between Norris's romantic authorial identity and his ability to absorb the very technologies of change that such an identity resists. Pitted against the idealized notion of literary narrative as the expression of a subjective autonomous being is Norris's preoccupation with various modern technologies that find their way into his work and shape the manner in which it is written. A particularly fascinating aspect is Wutz's exploration of Norris's resistance to the technology of the typewriter, viewed as an alienating mechanism that distances the author from his written word. Yet such an alienation finds its way into Norris's narratives, forming the written word itself and its overarching themes. With such examples, Wutz is able to provide insightful analysis into how literary narrative is shaped by its immediate technological context.

The chapters on Lowry are similarly insightful as the focus shifts to the influence of the cinema and engineering on Lowry's work. While these chapters are detailed and well-analyzed, it is arguably in the last chapters on Doctorow...

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