The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television

Notes

| 235 Notes Introduction 1. The distinction that I am implying between typography and screen fonts may suggest a rather unimaginative notion of what might constitute a “book” in the future; my intent in drawing this distinction is to focus attention on the cultural objects as they exist today. I will, however, encounter the possibilities presented by the e-book in Chapter 1. 2. On the battle over HDTV, see Joel Brinkley, Defining Vision. One must of course note the irony in the fact that these very references will themselves shortly be obsolete. 3. On these battles between media, see Green-Lewis; Stephens; Boorstin; Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind; Postman, Amusing; Owen. 4. See Ken Auletta: “Since the time when the book industry started calling itself an ‘industry,’ it has been in a state of ‘crisis.’ And yet, whatever the crisis, there have always been people prepared not only to buy books but to buy more books than anyone had ever bought before ” (Auletta 50). But in The Death of Literature Alvin Kernan argues—presumably without irony—that the sheer quantity of books published is in part responsible for reading’s demise (138). I consider this point further in Chapter 1. Chapter 1 1. See, on the history of death discourses, Mann, and on the history of technological obsolescence : McLuhan; Stephens; Levinson; Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. 2. See Foucault, Archaeology, in which the author argues for the uncovering of “[r]elations between statements (even if the author is unaware of them; even if the statements do not have the same author; even if the authors were unaware of each other’s existence); relations between groups of statements thus established (even if these groups do not concern the same, or even adjacent fields; even if they do not possess the same formal level; even if they are not the locus of assignable exchanges); relations between statements and groups of statements and events of a quite different kind (technical, economic, social, political)” (29). 3. See ibid., in which Foucault argues that discursive formations “define not the dumb existence of a reality nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects” (49). 4. In fact, this letter, while plausible, does not appear to exist; I have been unable to uncover the original. See Barth, LETTERS 439. 5. Moreover, Watt’s and Armstrong’s narratives both focus exclusively on the birth of the English novel; the novel’s end point looks quite radically different if one takes Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century Tale of Genji as its origin. 6. “The novel was the subject of heated popular debate in the late eighteenth century and, in many ways, was to the early national period what television was to the 1950s or MTV and video games to the 1980s. It was condemned as escapist, anti-intellectual, violent, pornographic; since it was a ‘fiction’ it was a lie and therefore evil. Since it often portrayed characters of low social station and even lower morals—foreigners, orphans, fallen women, beggar girls, women cross-dressing as soldiers, soldiers acting as seducers—it fomented social unrest by making the lower classes dissatisfied with their lot. The novel ostensibly contributed to the demise of community values, the rise in licentiousness and illegitimacy, the failure of education, the disintegration of the family; in short, the ubiquity of the novel . . . most assuredly meant the decline of Western civilization as it had previously been known” (Davidson, “Introduction” 3). 7. “To [its critics], the novel resembled a coquette who lured readers into a claustrophobic world of desire and self-indulgence, the antithesis of the public domain of rationality and men” (Gilmore 621). 8. On the purposeful exclusion of female authors from the canon of U.S. fiction, see Baym. 9. Temporarily: even aside from the standard postmodernist argument about the effacement of the difference between high and low, one can see a similar shift into the arena of respectability on the part of film since the 1970s introduction of film studies to the college curriculum . Once film became an object worthy of study, concerns devolved onto television. Now that the Birmingham school and its U.S. relatives have begun the process of recuperating television, one must wonder whether it will be able to make a similar migration across the great divide. Writing about much recent television (see, for instance, critical work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos) would seem to indicate the possibility (see McGrath...