The Technology of the Novel

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The connection between speech and writing in human language has been a matter of philosophical debate since antiquity. By plumbing the depths of this complex relationship, Tony E. Jackson explains how the technology of alphabetic writing has determined the nature of the modern novel.

Jackson's analysis begins with the universal human act of oral storytelling. While telling stories is fundamental to human experience, writing is not. Yet the novel, perhaps more than any other literary form, depends on writing. In fact, as Jackson shows quite clearly, it is writing rather than print that most shapes the forms and contents of the genre.

Through striking new readings of works by Austen, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Forster, Woolf, Lessing, and McEwan, Jackson reveals how the phenomena of speech and storytelling interact with the technological characteristics of writing. He also explains how those interactions induced the generic changes in the novel from its eighteenth-century beginnings to postmodernism and beyond. His claims, grounded in a contemporary understanding of human cognitive capacities and constraints, offer a fresh interpretive approach to all written literature.

An essential text in the study of the written word, The Technology of the Novel provides new insights into the evolving nature of one of the modern world's most popular narrative forms.

The Technology of the Novel Review

In recent decades the field of literary studies has been dominated by poststructuralist theory based on the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. However, by studying the work of Walter J. Ong, Tony E. Jackson underwent a great learning experience -- so great that he is no longer enamored with the poststructuralist conceptuality that he once held pretty firmly. Thus far, he is the only person I know of who has thought his way out from under poststructuralist conceptuality to Ong's thought.

Drawing on certain ideas from Ong, Jackson moves well beyond anything that Ong himself ever ventured to undertake as he examines in successive chapters Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, Charles Dickens' BLEAK HOUSE, E. M. Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA, Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES, Doris Lessing's THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, and Orson Welles's film CITIZEN CANE.

Jackson's extension of Ong's ideas is a welcome development. However, in his next book I'd like to see Jackson include the following six books as conversation partners:

(1) LITERARY VOICE: THE CALLING OF JONAH by Donald Wesling and Tadeusz Slawek (1995);

(2) STERNE'S WHIMSICAL THEATRES OF LANGUAGE: ORALITY, GESTURE, LITERACY by Alexis Tadie (2003);

(3) LAURENCE STERNE AND THE VISUAL IMAGINATION by W. B. Gerard (2006);

(4) THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION by Paul Goetsch (2003);

(5) VICTORIAN SOUNDSCAPE by John M. Picker (2003); and

(6) JAMES JOYCE: ORAL AND WRITTEN DISCOURSE AS MIRRORED IN EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE ART by Willi Erzgraber (2002; orig. German 1998).

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