The Media Assemblage: the Twentieth-Century Novel in Dialogue with Film, Television, and New Media

THE MEDIA ASSEMBLAGE: THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVEL IN DIALOGUE WITH FILM, TELEVISION, AND NEW MEDIA BY PAUL STEWART HACKMAN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael Rothberg, Chair Professor Robert Markley Associate Professor Jim Hansen Associate Professor Ramona Curry ABSTRACT At several moments during the twentieth-century, novelists have been made acutely aware of the novel as a medium due to declarations of the death of the novel. Novelists, at these moments, have found it necessary to define what differentiates the novel from other media and what makes the novel a viable form of art and communication in the age of images. At the same time, writers have expanded the novel form by borrowing conventions from these newer media. I describe this process of differentiation and interaction between the novel and other media as a “media assemblage” and argue that our understanding of the development of the novel in the twentieth century is incomplete if we isolate literature from the other media forms that compete with and influence it. The concept of an assemblage describes a historical situation in which two or more autonomous fields interact and influence one another. On the one hand, an assemblage is composed of physical objects such as TV sets, film cameras, personal computers, and publishing companies, while, on the other hand, it contains enunciations about those objects such as claims about the artistic merit of television, beliefs about the typical audience of a Hollywood blockbuster, or academic discussions about canonicity. These disparate forces that make up an assemblage are in constant flux as new participants in the assemblage destabilize old relationships and create new ones. Through the use of assemblage theory I am able to look at both the material circumstances that differentiate novels from newer media and the enunciations that have sought to define new territory for fiction apart from film, television, or new media. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a distinct medium at a different moment in the twentieth century. Chapter One examines novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West written in the 1930s. Both novelists spent time working in Hollywood, hoping to make money ii writing for the rapidly growing film industry. West and Fitzgerald criticize Hollywood even though both were attracted to film and developed writing techniques influenced by their time working as screenwriters. Both writers use a beautiful but shallow young woman as their symbolic representation of Hollywood, a woman who entices and angers the male protagonist. Such an ambivalent and sexist response, I argue, corresponds to the conflicted feelings of the novelists towards the new medium of film and its potential effects on the novel. Chapter Two pairs two novels from the middle of the century, Richard Yates’s domestic novel Revolutionary Road and Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There. Both novels bemoan the superficial quality of much of American life post World War II, manifesting their critique in attacks on television and its negative effects on the family and politics, respectively. Both novels connect television to an emasculated male protagonist, arguing that television contributes to a passive and unsophisticated populace. Yet, television’s ability to instantly connect millions of people through a common experience and blur the distinction between private and public life proves attractive to the characters and influential on the writing styles of the novels. Chapter Three brings together a print novel and a hypertext novel from the mid-90s. Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 asks whether a computer can be trained to impersonate an English graduate student while Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl brings to life the monstrous female companion from Frankenstein as the hypertext novel itself. Both texts discuss the future of the material medium of print through the metaphor of the female body. The protagonist of Galatea interweaves his sexual feelings with his love of the printed page, reversing the gender associations made by Fitzgerald and West sixty years earlier, while Patchwork Girl criticizes the association of the female body with hypertext. Interestingly, the print novel overloads the reader iii with information and allusions that require frequent references to the internet while the hypertext novel depends on allusions to print to give structure and stability to its malleable electronic form. The final chapter moves away from analyzing individual media assemblages to looking at how media assemblages change over time. I organize Don DeLillo’s expansive novel Underworld into three separate assemblages active during the Cold War. In so doing I go against the tendency in the scholarship to read DeLillo’s novel as critical of or influenced by some monolithic entity known as “the mass media.” Instead, the complex relationships at work in not just one static media assemblage but the dynamic shifts between assemblages correspond to the complicated paranoia evoked by the Cold War. After analyzing how one novel attempts to better understand the past through changes in the American media assemblage, my epilogue examines how a number of science fiction novels, imagine the media assemblages of the future. As these novels describe a future after the hypothetical death of print they reveal that a media assemblage is much more than a set of technologies, but instead a web of fears, ideologies, and definitions that describe the role of the novelist within the culture. Each of the selected texts makes media a significant part of the narrative, but ultimately the ideas produced by placing the novel within a media assemblage should be useful for better understanding any novel’s position in relation to the dynamic mediascape of its time. Even writers that do not specifically address the status of the novel or acknowledge the influence of other media write within a media context that defines conventions of realism, style, and content, and the relationship of the novel to other media becomes interwoven with definitions of art, history, and gender. Reading the twentieth century novel in relationship to other media is not one critical option among many but, rather, an essential reconfiguration of the field. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the guidance and effort contributed by my advisor, Michael Rothberg, to the completion of this project. Professor Rothberg read every page carefully and quickly, and his initial insights and suggestions shaped the project fundamentally. Perhaps my strongest motivation for completing the project was to make all the valuable time he spent encouraging and directing me worthwhile. I would also like to thank Bob Markley for introducing me to science fiction and Marshall McLuhan, Jim Hansen for many good discussions about politics and film, and Ramona Curry for first inspiring my interest in film studies and feminism and then joining my committee late in the process when I needed her help. I would also like to thank my wife, Jill, for her patience and support throughout the long process. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE NOVEL MEDIUM.......………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE: THE ART OF THE FUTURE..………………………………………………25 CHAPTER TWO: PRIVATE PROBLEMS, PUBLIC MEDIUM...…………………………….75 CHAPTER THREE: CODED BINARIES……………………………………………………..130 CHAPTER FOUR: AMERICA AND THE MEDIA ASSEMBLAGE IN FLUX..……………192 EPILOGUE: THE ART OF THE FUTURE……..……………………………………………...230 WORKS CITED….…………………………………………………………………………….265 vi Introduction: The Novel Medium The Novel is Both Young and Old Mikhail Bakhtin opens his essay on the study of the novel as a literary genre, “Epic and Novel,” with the observation that “the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities” (3). For Bakhtin the novel is different from all previous literary genres (in particular the epic) because its more recent birth means it continues to incorporate other genres and develop both its form and conventions. While the formats of other genres were developed and codified centuries ago before being passed down to those of us living in the present, the novel remains open-ended and malleable. We do not just analyze the novel form, then, but instead we help shape it, for the novel, unlike the epic with its concern for the ancient past, “reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making” (7). Such an analogy – novel as growing child – is difficult to reconcile with one of the most pervasive descriptions of the novel in the twentieth century, namely the novel as a medium on the verge of death. To be fair Bakhtin’s article was first written in 1941 and, thus, predates the rise of television in the 1950s, a cultural shift most often associated with the decline of the novel. Jerome Klinkowitz introduces his study of the 1960s American novel by observing “It must feel strange indeed to be an emerging novelist when the novel has just died” (2). Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature argues that “Television and other forms of electronic communication have increasingly replaced the printed book, especially its idealized form, literature” (3). Leslie A. Fiedler titles an essay “The Death and Rebirth of the Novel” in which the high-art novel passes 1 away only to be reborn through hybridization with film. Wilson Dizard, Jr.’s 1994 overview of new media, Old Media New Media, titles its chapter on print “Gutenberg’s Last Stand?” and Peter Schneck jokes that “the novel (and for that matter, the author) have been declared dead so many times over the past four or five decades that literary history almost assumed the form of an endless necrologue” (65).

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