(2) Spiegel distinguishes between "Interior Form" (Lawrence, Woolf) and "Cinematographic Form" (James, Conrad, Joyce) to describe the most important innovations of modern literature in his book Fiction and the Camera-Eye (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1976). BACK
(3) Martin Heidegger, cited in Thomas Irmer, Metafiction, Moving Pictures, Moving Histories. Der historische Roman in der Literatur der amerikanischen Postmoderne. Tübingen: Gunter Narr 1995, p. 149. BACK
(4) cf. Julika Griem, "Screening America: Representations of Television in Contemporary American Literature". Node9 1 (January 1997). Available on the internet at the address node9.phil3.uni-freiburg.de/1997/griem.html. BACK
(5) Cecilia Tichi, "Television and Recent American Fiction". American Literary History 1:1 (Spring 1989), p. 110-130. Here p. 110. BACK
(6) cf. sections [4] to [10] in Griem for a more detailed discussion of the literary strategies of these writers. BACK
(7) Griem, section [9]. BACK
(8) Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge 1992, p. 130. "Ontological plurality" is for McHale the defining feature of postmodern literature which has left the epistemological concerns of modern literature behind. McHale's definition does not concern me here, but the notion of TV as a ontological pluralizer is helpful in distinguishing Coover's and Abish's works from Updike's and Kosinski's more oppositional treatment of the medium. BACK
(9) Griem, section [13]. BACK
(10) Cecilia Tichi, Electronic Hearth. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 1991, p. 8. BACK
(11) ibid. BACK
(12) David Foster Wallace, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young". Review of Contemporary Fiction 8:1 (1988), p. 38/39. The article is not available online but the Review of Contemporary Fiction has found a nice online home at the website of their publisher, the Dalkey Archive Press: www.dalkeyarchive.com/review.html. Definitely one of the most interesting journals dealing with contemporary literature, where Wallace has published a couple of his essays, especially "E Unibus Pluram" (cf. 13) BACK
(13) David Foster Wallace: "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". Review of Contemporary Fiction 13:2 (Summer 1993), p. 151-194, Here p. 155. BACK
(14) The understanding of television as an environment is at the heart of Cecilia Tichi's study, Electronic Hearth, in which she investigates the ways that television has become so thoroughly familiarized in our culture. For her, "television-as-environment is as bold as it is baffling, provocative but lacking ready reference and thus apt to leave one mentally as blank as the turned-off screen itself." (p. 3) According to Tichi, the representation of this invisible environment is one of the greatest challenges of contemporary fiction: "TV environment can and must be made visible." (p. 4) BACK
(15) Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram", p. 169. BACK
(16) Griem, section [30]. BACK