ABSTRACT
The Introduction chapter establishes the concept of radical mediation as a process that actively generates and transforms situations, experiences, and events to provide the conditions that create subjects and objects. First, it situates voice studies in terms of contemporary media studies (e.g., Richard Grusin, Alan Liu, Friedrich Kittler, Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gitelman, and Marshall McLuhan), showing how the voice of the novel self-reflexively reveals its agency by accounting for other voices within its mind’s eye, and pointing to mutability and efficacy that stress the novel’s significance even as it is formally created anew in the twenty-first century. Second, it asserts the ability of the novel’s voice to relate historicity, as evidenced by contemporary novels such as Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), among others. Third, it posits the networked topologies portrayed in works like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredible Close (2005) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) as a means to address the vexed questions surrounding democracy and citizenship today.
