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.

The introduction argues that American literature participates in American culture’s ongoing quest for immediacy, that the effort to generate ever-new reality effects has sparked the innovation of new literary techniques and forms, and that a common strategy American writers have used since the nineteenth century to create texts of greater immediacy has been to study and rework the reality effects of photography, film, and television. The chapter defines immediacy as a culturally and historically situated effect that indicates how the relation between reality and representation as well as between knowledge and mediation is construed in a given culture. In media history, claims to immediacy play a central role in the competition and alignment between media. The introduction shows that literature participates in this dynamic and promotes an understanding of literature as a medium rather than an art form. The chapter argues that literary studies will produce more complex accounts of literary history if it reconceptualizes the dynamics of literary experimentation and innovation from a comparative media perspective. The introduction also outlines the book’s chapters.