University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2017 "You Will Hold This Book in Your Hands": The Novel and Corporeality in the New Media Ecology Jason Shrontz University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Shrontz, Jason, ""You Will Hold This Book in Your Hands": The Novel and Corporeality in the New Media Ecology" (2017). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 558. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/558 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “YOU WILL HOLD THIS BOOK IN YOUR HANDS”: THE NOVEL AND CORPOREALITY IN THE NEW MEDIA ECOLOGY BY JASON SHRONTZ A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF JASON SHRONTZ APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Naomi Mandel Jeremiah Dyehouse Ian Reyes Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relationship between the print novel and new media. It argues that this relationship is productive; that is, it locates the novel and new media within a tense, but symbiotic relationship. This requires an understanding of media relations that is ecological, rather than competitive. More precise, this dissertation investigates ways that the novel incorporates new media. The word “incorporate” refers both to embodiment and physical union. This dissertation asks: when the novel and new media are coupled, what is produced? It answers this question through the close critical reading of four novels: The Zero by Jess Walter, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Each of these novels bears the markings of the tension between the print novel and new media. One of the ways in which this tension is evident is through innovative narrative structures. Jess Walter’s The Zero, contains a schizophrenic narrative structure that includes frequent gaps and omits major plot components. Its structure emulates the novel’s saturation of digressive media images that become the “wallpaper” of the protagonist’s mind. The inclusion of an eighty-page power point presentation in Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad, for example, adopts new media reading practices for its own narrative purposes. The novels also frequently draw attention to corporeality and the physical fact of the print novel. The glow-in-the-dark cover of Mr. Penumbra imagines the coupling of the print novel and the computer screen. Both Sloan’s and Shteyngart’s novels explore the devaluation of the human corpus and the physical coupling between print and digital artifacts. Finally, each of the novels dwells upon the shifting lexicon of tactility. The words used to describe connection—staying in contact, keeping in touch—no longer have anything to do with physical touch; rather, the language of tactility masks the absence of physical connection. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Naomi Mandel for her guidance and wisdom, not only in the capacity of this dissertation, but also in her counsel of being a teacher, an academic, and a writer. Thank you for your commitment to this project. Thank you for your enthusiasm and honest criticism. I would also like to thank Jeremiah Dyehouse and Ian Reyes for your willingness to be a part of this process at every stage. The development of this project is reflective of the hours I have spent discussing it with each of you in your offices. Thank you for being so giving of your time. Thank you, too, to Kyle Kusz for chairing my defense. My scholarship and personality as a scholar has benefitted from our conversations. I offer sincere thanks to Jean Walton, Kathleen Davis, and Valerie Karno. Your generous counsel in the early stages of this project had a major impact on its final form and focus. I would also like to thank Michelle Caraccia for her organization and endless support of the English Department’s graduate students. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Stacey Shrontz. Your patience is not natural. Your commitment to this project, and your belief in me, sustained me when my commitment and belief were too exhausted to put on pants in the morning. Thank you, too, to our three children, Beatrice, Harper, and Hazel (who was only eleven weeks old on the day of my defense). Your energy is unfathomable, but it is necessary. Thank you for pulling me away from the screen when I needed it the most. iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………..............v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 – “A Thousand Technological Miracles Later”: Anxiety and New Media in Jess Walter’s The Zero……………………………………………32 Chapter 2 – “Losing Touch”: Social Media and Human Connection in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad…………………………………….76 Chapter 3 – “Silence, Black and Complete”: Connection and Identity Construction in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story…………………124 Chapter 4 – “You Will Hold this Book in Your Hands”: Topography, Corporeality, and Media Coupling in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore……………………………………………164 Conclusion – “Imagine New Forms”: A Survey of the Novel’s Incorporation of New Media…………………………………………………….210 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………...221 v Introduction “You have found your way into a story that has been unfolding for a very long time” (Sloan 173). The Novel in Formation On November 2, 2015, only five years after a remarkably grim decade of print book sales that prompted the rampant closure of bookstores across the country, Amazon opened its first bricks and mortar bookstore. Readers could visit the bookstore to purchase, among other things, print books. The store stocks about 5000 titles, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (Bensinger). Furthermore, the cover of every book is in formation, facing outward, like glowing screens, “making it easier for customers to browse” (Levy). Picturing the bookstore, it is not difficult to conflate the rows of outward facing books with that row of digital icons near the bottom of your Amazon Prime page, which showcases the books that all the other, more dedicated readers are buying at that moment. In a brief history of the book and consumer habits since 2000, it quickly becomes clear that the media ecology, and particularly print, is in a state of transition. Between 2000 and 2007, one thousand bookstores closed across the US (Reach). In 2011, Borders, the mega-bookstore pioneer closed its last store, and Barnes and Noble continues to close stores across the country. E-readers flooded the market in the mid-00s, including Amazon’s Kindle in 2007, which sold out only 5.5 hours after its release (Patel).1 By 2011, only four years later, The New York Times reported “Amazon sold 105 1 The first modern e-reader was developed in 1998, but it was the development of electronic paper—a display that reflected light like regular paper and did not require a backlight—that propelled the e-reader 1 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books,” citing the evidence as “proof that [Amazon] has successfully leapt from a print business to a digital one, a transition that has challenged most companies that sell media” (Miller and Bosman).2 These signs have not only been interpreted as evidence of the printed book’s demise, but also as the end of a shared system of ambiguously defined values somehow associated with print. In The New Republic, for example, Nicole Krauss concludes an article with an alarmist’s plea: “When you download an e-book, it is worth stopping to consider what you are choosing, why, and what your choice means. If enough people stop taking their business to bookstores, bookstores—all bookstores—will close. And that, in turn, will threaten a set of values that has been with us for as long as we have had books” (Krauss). Even though it was difficult to ever imagine the book vanishing from the media ecology, it was clear that something was changing. Then, about a decade later, trends started to shift again. Since 2009, the number of independent bookstores has increased by more than 27 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association (qtd. in Heyman). A 2016 report from the Association of American Publishers stated “ebook sales declined by nearly 25% from Jan. 2015” (Publishers). The shifting industry trends and the paranoia of losing a set of values describe the volatility of the media ecology, but to what, or where, does this volatility lead? The answer can perhaps be found in an unusual and unexpected place: the Amazon bricks-and-mortar store. On November 2, 2015, Amazon opened its first bricks- into a viable alternative to the book. Sony used the technology with two products in 2004 and 2006, but its most popular use was on Amazon’s Kindle, which was released in 2007 and sold out in 5.5 hours (Patel). 2 The article continues to report,” Over all, e-books account for only 14 percent of all general consumer fiction and nonfiction books sold.” This 14 percent, however, is rather significant, considering that Amazon 2 and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, Washington. By January of 2017, three more have opened with plans for at least eight by the end of the year, including a Manhattan location to be opened in the Spring of 2017 (Wingfield).