How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age? Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis's J R and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho through to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Through these histories, the book charts the ways in which print-based postmodern writing at first resisted new mass media forms and ultimately came to respond to them.

Introduction. The inoperable machine : a media history of late postmodernism -- The tiny box wherein everything is solved : new media narrative, communication technology, and the conversation -- Grooves on the feeling knob : systematic transgression in William T. Vollmann's The rainbow stories and Bret Easton Ellis's American psycho -- "Way closer to the soul than mere tastelessness can get" : David Foster Wallace and transcendent extra-textuality.

Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.

In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic.Laying bare th foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control. From a strange and hilarious encounter with a Stepford Wife neighbor to an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, to a sexy cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, to a housecleaning team in space suits, a mistress calling on a cell phone, and a hostage situationat a school, A.M. Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that thery are entriely believable.

Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.