Literary Hybrids

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.

Much like the fantastic marginalia of medieval illuminated manuscripts, medieval and modern hybrid characters-including werewolves, serpent women, and wild men-function as a frame, critiquing the discourses that run through their texts. In Literary Hybrids, Erika Hess provides a close reading of one such hybrid-the female cross-dresser in thirteenth-century French romance-examining the interplay between physical and narrative ambiguity. Hess argues that the hybrid figure in medieval and contemporary French literature challenges the traditionally accepted natural order, upsets rational thinking, and underscores a concern with totalizing discourses or perspectives.

This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's œuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.

Since the 1960s, academics have theorized that literature is on its way to becoming obsolete or, at the very least, has lost part of its power as an influential medium of social and cultural critique. This work argues against that misconception and maintains that contemporary American literature is not only alive and well but has grown in significant ways that reflect changes in American culture during the last twenty years. In addition, this work argues that beginning in the 1980s, a new, allied generation of American writers, born from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, has emerged, whose hybrid fiction blend distinct elements of previous American literary movements and contain divided social, cultural and ethnic allegiances. The author explores psychological, philosophical, ethnic and technological hybridity. The author also argues for the importance of and need for literature in contemporary America and considers its future possibilities in the realms of the Internet and hypertext. David Foster Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Sherman Alexie, William Vollmann, Michele Serros and Dave Eggers are among the writers whose hybrid fictions are discussed.