American Literature and Immediacy

Heike Schaefer is Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany. She is a former Fulbright fellow, author of Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography (2004), and has edited several books and special issues, including The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (2019), Literary Knowledge Production and the Life Sciences (2017), and Network Theory and American Studies (2015).

• The quest for immediacy in American literature and media culture; Part I. Literary Immediacy and Photography: 1. The poet as 'exact reporter of the essential law': Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetics in the context of early photography; 2. 'To exalt the present and the real': Walt Whitman's photographic poetry; 3. The politics of paying attention: the romantic desire for immediacy; Part II. Literary Immediacy and the Cinema: 4. 'Living moving pictures': the thrills of early cinema; 5. 'Making a cinema of it': seriality and presence in Gertrude Stein's early literary portraits; 6. 'A novel like a documentary film': cinematic writing as cultural critique in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer; Part III. Literary Immediacy and Television: 7. Being there: television's aesthetics of immediacy; 8. For real? The critique of TV culture in the short fiction of Robert Coover and David Foster Wallace; 9. “Nothing happens until it is consumed': the remediation of TV images in Don DeLillo's novel Mao II; 10. Fiction in the age of television; Still in pursuit; Bibliography.

'Media archaeology from the literary inside out: immediacy theory, scrupulously pursued from photography's transparent eyeball to the universal tube, from transcendentalism through cinematic montage to the ethos of tele-presencing. Emerson and Whitman speak to Stein and Coover, Dos Passos to DeLillo and Wallace, as never before across the very leaps of technological advance in an intermedial evolution of American poetics. Schaefer's adjustable lens enhances her panoramic traveling shot of this terrain with verbal close-ups that lock in an immediate - and indispensable - focus all their own. Entering a lively scholarly dialogue on competing media, her book canvasses literary voices that, even when those of familiar suspects, have unexpected news to bring. This engrossing study will be of interest equally to students of American literary history, media theory, the tradition of ekphrastic writing, and the video-inflected discontinuities of postmodernist narrative in an epoch of visual literacy.' Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa and author of Transmedium and Cinemachines