Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Virtual Modernism examines provocative links among literature, journalism, and social theory during the Progressive Era in the United States. Katherine Biers persuasively makes the case that the period’s emphasis on the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media is particularly resonant with theorists today. Moreover, contemporary interest in ‘the virtual,’ she suggests, can trace its roots to this period in U.S. cultural history. A stimulating and important book." —Jane Thrailkill, author of
Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism"At the crossroads of media studies and American studies, but also of philosophy and cultural history, this book offers a highly innovative and dramatically inspiring close-reading of the way in which five major America modernists developed new ways of writing in response to mass culture and the new (media) technologies that reshaped American culture in the pre World-War I years."—Leonardo Reviews
"Engaging and original, with useful notes, this well-researched study provides insight into the development of modernism and its connection to the turn-of-the-century conception of the virtual."—CHOICE
"Katherine Biers’s Virtual Modernism provides a welcome collection of well-thought-out, critical, and deeply insightful readings of Modernist texts that elucidate the power of the virtual as a concept."—American Studies Journal
"The greatest triumph of Virtual Modernism is that Biers successfully demonstrates how each of her subjects strives to articulate the quest for virtual experience, or what Martin Jay terms 'experience without a subject.'"—The Year’s Work in English Studies
"Biers’s bracing interpretations bring cultural critique into exhilarating conjunction with the lessons of media studies."—American Literature
"Situating a literary text in the midst of a changing media landscape makes it possible for Biers to recover a forgotten set of concerns. . . that once filled these texts with a sense of relevance, novelty, and potentiality."—American Literary History
"At the crossroads of media studies and American studies, and also of philosophy and cultural history, Virtual Modernism offers a highly innovative and dramatically inspiring close reading. . . Biers has written a landmark study that gives an inspirational twist to modernism studies."—Leonardo
"A study of considerable brilliance that will set the terms of debate on modernism’s relation to media, pragmatism, and progressivism for many years to come."—Textual Practice
"Skillfully sketching out a genealogy of the early encounters of modernist writing with mass media and communications technologies, Katherine Biers’s Virtual Modernism is a valuable contribution to both American literary criticism and media studies."—Journal of Modern Literature
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: The Promise of the Virtual1. Stephen Crane’s Abilities2. Realizing Trilby: Henry James, George du Maurier, and the Intermedial Scene3. Syncope Fever: James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice4. Wonder and Decay: Djuna Barnes’s New York5. Gertrude Stein Talking
AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
