Literature in Contemporary Media Culture

How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over the last decade has charted the impact of new technologies on human conduct. It explores how changes in literary production, distribution, and consumption can be correlated to changes in social practices more generally. And it examines how (and if) contemporary media culture affects our understanding of literary aesthetics.
Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.

Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University:
Literature in Contemporary Media Culture is the first collection I’ve seen that rigorously applies media theory from Friedrich Kittler and Gilles Deleuze to Katherine Hayles and younger theorists, to specific recent literary works, both poetry and fiction. Its three-fold division—Technology—Subjectivity—Aesthetics--makes it possible to see just how thoroughly the literary field has been transformed. Studying the actual processes of authorial production in the new media climate – whether in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle or in Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial Soliloquy – Sarah J. Paulson and Anders Skare Malvik have put together a superb set of essays, transformative in their thinking. Literature, the collection argues persuasively, shows no signs of going away: it is the understanding of literature that must change.