The Anxiety of Obsolescence

[Dave Monroe]

The Anxiety of Obsolescence
The American Novel in the Age of Television
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Binding Paperback
List price: $34.95
ISBN 9780826515209
Pages 288
Dimensions 6in x 9in
Illustrations 0
Publication Date 2006-07-14

It almost goes without saying that the rise in popularity of
television has killed the audience for "serious" literature. This is
such a given that reading Fitzpatrick's challenge to this notion can
be very disconcerting, as she traces the ways in which a small cadre
of writers of "serious" literature--DeLillo, Pynchon, and Franzen, for
instance--have propagated this myth in order to set themselves up as
the last bastions of good writing. Fitzpatrick first explores whether
serious literature was ever as all-pervasive as critics of the
television culture claim and then asks the obvious question: what, or
who, exactly, are these guys defending good writing against?

Fitzpatrick examines the ways in which the anxiety about the supposed
death of the novel is built on a myth of the novel's past ubiquity and
its present displacement by television. She explores the ways in which
this myth plays out in and around contemporary fiction and how it
serves as a kind of unacknowledged discourse about race, class, and
gender. The declaration constructs a minority status for the "white
male author" who needs protecting from television's largely female and
increasingly non-white audience. The novel, then, is transformed from
a primary means of communication into an ancient, almost forgotten,
and thus, treasured form reserved for the well-educated and
well-to-do, and the men who practice it are exalted as the
practitioners of an almost lost art.

Such positioning serves to further marginalize women writers and
writers of color because it makes the novel, by definition, the
preserve of the poor endangered white man. If the novel is only a
product of a small group of white men, how can the contributions of
women and writers of color be recognized? Instead, this positioning
abandons women and people of color to television as a creative outlet,
and in return, cedes television to them. Fitzpatrick argues that
there's a level of unrecognized patronization in assuming that
television serves no purpose but to provide dumb entertainment to
bored women and others too stupid to understand novels. And, instead,
she demonstrates the real positive effects of a televisual culture.

http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/11/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence

http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/12/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/

Recall, e.g. ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9612&msg=8438

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9810&msg=32768

Et al., as well as ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0608&msg=104885