New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature

Casey Michael Henry is Carl H. Pforzheimer Postdoctoral Fellow in English at The City College of New York, USA.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Inoperable Machine: A Media History of Late PostmodernismSection One: The Tiny Box Wherein Everything is Solved: New Media Narrative, Communication Technology, and the Conversation Novels of William GaddisProblems in Two-DimensionsPostmodern Issues / Good Intentions: New Media Art and MethodEven Agnostics Have Truth: The Verity of Bill ViolaNauman, Burden, Jokes, and CrueltyTwo Sides of a Shadow: Stelarc, Chat Bots, and the Phantom LibidoNon-attribution: Corporeal Fluidity in William Gaddis's Conversation NovelsSection Two: Grooves on the Feeling Knob: Systematic Transgression in William T. Vollmann's The Rainbow Stories and Bret Easton Ellis's American PsychoFraming Excess: An Introduction to Systematic TransgressionSensory Movements: William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories, and "Emotional Calculus"Less Sad the Second Time Around: American Psycho and the Selfhood of RepetitionSection Three: "Way Closer to the Soul than Mere Tastelessness Can Get": David Foster Wallace and Transcendent Extra-TextualityUnforeseen Ruptures: David Foster Wallace's Big Break, or, The Legacy of Experimentalism"Sudden Awakening to the Fact that the Mischief is Irretrievably Done": Epiphanic Structure in Infinite JestThe Great Beyond: Textual Relationality in Brief Interviews with Hideous MenEpilogueReferencesIndex

The question of a possible lineage between the work of Burden, Wallace, and Candy Crush is an intriguing and perhaps subver¬sive one to ask. Henry’s eagerness to make these connections speaks to the intellectual daring on display in this book.