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  • Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology by Daniel Punday
  • Kurt Cavender
Punday, Daniel. 2012. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. $60.00 hc. 268pp.

Daniel Punday’s Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology adds another voice to the rhetorical struggle to define the novel’s place in emerging new media relations. Is new media culture best understood as a totalizing system, as an open field of unrealized possibilities, or as a complex, dynamic assemblage? This rich diversity of figurative possibilities forms the context for Punday’s own quite remarkable claim: that, far from conceding the cultural relevance of the novel to emerging new media, the current generation of media novelists are using representations of media objects in their texts to “rediscover a vocation [for narrative prose fiction] by exploring the limits of the medium” (39). In this sense, Writing at the Limit brackets one debate on the nature of media relations for the sake of a very different discussion of the narrative function of media representations. Where Punday diverges from the broader concerns of media theory is in his interest not in creative combinations and recombinations of media technologies, but in the way a single medium represents other media as part of a struggle to activate its own potential.

The result is a particular emphasis on media ecologies—the multiple interacting relations, connections, and processes of media—as rhetorically constituted, a “consistent focus on media limits in the contemporary US novel” that foregrounds the novel’s active participation in shaping its media environment (26). The argument that follows seeks to understand the contemporary novel’s assertion of its own evolving role in this larger media ecology in terms of the way it “integrate[s] media into the plot level of the narrative” (38). Punday is not interested in biographically significant or ideologically invested media presences—the obviously symbolic moments which have tended to attract critical attention because of their broad interpretive power—but in “lower-level, seemingly decorative elements [that] are often crucial to the mechanical tasks of organizing narrative” (47). It is in their apparently incidental uses of such media (painting, music, theater, but also television, radio, and film) that contemporary novels “coalesce around a quality of writing they find to be centrally important to the novel’s vocation today: the ability to represent the absent, potential, or unrealized” (114). [End Page 139]

Punday imagines this ability as the unique creative potential of the novel to gesture beyond the limits of its own representational capacity. This idea is developed by carefully negotiating the tension between the need for grounding theoretical argumentation and an equally necessary close analysis of contemporary treatments of narrative media objects. Each chapter pairs a theoretical concept or development—media discourse, the “vocation” of the novel, the problem of media limits, new digital media forms—with a set of exemplary texts. For instance, Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland “invoke other media at the story level in a way that shows their effects on the tales being told,” while Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and Tom Robbins’s Still Life with Woodpecker demonstrate how the circulation of media “leads to an examination of a medium’s potentials and limits” (38–39). Also figuring prominently are Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey.

Through a series of compelling close readings in chapter 3, among the strongest of which are clever readings of Kenneth Gangemi’s The Interceptor Pilot and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Punday demonstrates how the novel’s unique linguistic capacity for invoking the speculative and the hypothetical becomes a tool for challenging conventional accounts of the novel’s distinct role within a larger media ecology. Here he identifies five critical narrative elements of the novel—description, setting, world, character, and plot—that have often served to explain the attraction of the novel, and shows how contemporary works use representations of media objects to explode these conventional...

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