Writing at the Limit

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Writing at the Limit

The Novel in the New Media Ecology

Daniel Punday

Frontiers of Narrative Series

280 pages
15 illustrations

Hardcover

May 2012

978-0-8032-3646-2

$60.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

May 2012

978-0-8032-4081-0

$60.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

While some cultural critics are pronouncing the death of the novel, a whole generation of novelists have turned to other media with curiosity rather than fear. These novelists are not simply incorporating references to other media into their work for the sake of verisimilitude, they are also engaging precisely such media as a way of talking about what it means to write and read narrative in a society filled with stories told outside the print medium.

By examining how some of our best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday offers an enlightening look into the current status of such fundamental narrative concepts as character, plot, and setting. He considers well-known postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, more-accessible authors like Maxine Hong Kingston and Oscar Hijuelos, and unjustly overlooked writers like Susan Daitch and Kenneth Gangemi, and asks how their works investigate the nature and limits of print as a medium for storytelling.

Writing at the Limit explores how novelists locate print writing within the contemporary media ecology, and what it really means to be writing at print’s media limit.

Author Bio

Daniel Punday is a professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Purdue University–Calumet. His most recent books are Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction and Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology.

Praise

"Writing at the Limit is a necessary study of limits: not just of what the critic can say about the novel, but also of what the novel can say about itself."—Kurt Cavender, College Literature

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Rhetorical Construction of Media Ecologies

1. Multimedia Moments Old and New

2. Story, Discourse, and Circulation 000

3. Defining the Vocation of the Novel through Narrative Elements

4. Writing Beyond the Media Limit?

5. Negotiating Public and Private Spaces

Coda: Connection through Limits and the Myth of Media Fullness

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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