Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (review)

Michael Wutz's Enduring Words ambitiously sets out to explore the reasons and significance behind literary print narrative's survival in a technological age that at times threatens to supersede it. Though Wutz's text advertises itself as being "An interdisciplinary study of the conditions of narrative fiction in the age of its supposed obsolescence," his sources are primarily modernist literature and commentaries filtered through a postmodernist theoretical lens. This organization makes sense in that Wutz is concerned with the notion of the "posthuman," as explained by Katherine Hayles and Donna Harraway's evolutionary cyborg in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," and how these states relate to human cognitive forces in both interpreting and constructing literary narrative. In this sense, Wutz does occupy a locus of conversation that intersects with topics in new media, print culture, literary studies, film studies, and even neurology. The text is organized into eight chapters including an introduction, in general each addressing a different narratological aspect illustrated by an accompanying modern author and/or director with related antecedents, both literary and filmic. While this combination of perspectives is at several junctures enlightening—especially the early modernist literary connections Wutz draws between the representation of mangled hands and mechanized mediation in Frank Norris' McTeague—his overall conclusions at times seem defensive and/or unwilling to engage specific literary products of new media.

Immediately, Wutz somewhat contentiously opens his text by invoking Marinetti and his Futurist movement, marking their call for the death of print and all things old, especially books. The battleground for the survival of print texts and their narratives, then, is at the fin de siècle, both a cultural and temporal turning-point where mechanical mediums threaten to overtake unmediated artistic expression. Wutz explains, "Once the gramophone and film had emerged as the new bullies on the media block, there to absorb the acoustic and visual data streams hitherto confined to print, writing lost its erstwhile centrality and was forced into the margins of discourse, a demotion that the advent of the binary code has accelerated further" (2). While Marinetti's Futurist perspective can hardly be considered the norm, Wutz considers more reasonable voices, generally contrary to Marinetti, on the issue of mechanical reproducibility and mediation. Significantly, he consults Walter Benjamin on art and modern shock, who was wary of mechanizing art. Also, in consulting E.L. Doctorow, Wutz points to "the capaciousness of narrative to accommodate and reflect on all other discourses, including that of the (mass) media, on the threshold of the postmodern," a formidable opponent of Futurism (16).

Cognition is at the heart of and what's at stake in this somewhat binary "push-me-pull-you" relationship between print and visual media. Focusing on Doctorow's assessment that "visual media remain vastly inferior to print because they subordinate complexities of thought to an uncontoured void," Wutz displays visual media pitted against print narrative throughout the discourses through which he's moving, posing (again, via Doctorow), "literary discourse, by contrast, lays bare the processes of cognition, conception, and the self through verbal elaboration and development" (16). But Wutz soon carries the comparison over to digital media, warping ahead in time: "Digital technologies carry the promise of such cognitive and substantive flattening as well, given that such technologies are often controlled by global software players managing the information streams of the World Wide Web" (16), continuing on to say, "If representation as one of the quintessential modes of artistic work switches from the alphabet to digits, Doctorow urges, humans are in danger of surrendering the complexities of their self and thought to corporate software engineers controlling the (surface) codes within which the work of the imagination and the writing of history will take place" (17). The survivability of literary narrative, according to Wutz, can be attributed to its multi-modal transference into digital interfaces—ways of reading and organizing print are often maintained in digital spaces. That, and he also accounts for corporate incentives...