Still in Pursuit

Summary

The conclusion comments on the cultural functions that experiences of immediacy possess and outlines the productive contributions that the academic study of literary immediacy can make to literary and cultural studies, especially if it approaches literature from a comparative media perspective. The chapter summarizes that American Literature and Immediacy explores literary narratives of new media encounter, and the stylistic and thematic innovations they inspired, to show that American literary culture absorbs media cultural changes as it participates in the pervasive cultural quest for increased immediacy. The book describes how American writers compared the immediacy effects of photography, film, and television to literature’s representational possibilities to re-envision the imaginative and critical role that literary practice could play in a culture increasingly shaped by mass media. The conclusion also discusses the use of voice recognition software by the novelist Richard Powers and cites his compositional strategy as an example of how contemporary writers continue to successfully appropriate new media technologies in search of immediacy, full expression, and literary innovation.