American Literature and Immediacy sets out to explore ways in which American writers have sought to create “immediacy” effects in their writing. This entails rendering the world and its selves as present and unmediated to readers, satisfying the desire to feel directly connected to people and events. The example given at the outset is Walt Whitman promising his readers to “Spring from the pages into your arms” in Leaves of Grass (quoted at 1). Three major phases of American writing are considered through case studies – Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism. Whilst the scope of this study is clear from the outset, there is no general background or introduction to the quest for immediacy by writers outside the last two hundred years of American history, which might have provided further interesting context through which to channel the discussion. The discussion of the “three major stages” listed above is largely confined to outlining existing critical debates about the authors of those stages, and their interaction with literary movements and technologically driven cultural change.

In Part I, Schaefer examines the work of Walt Whatman and Ralph Waldo Emerson following the emergence of photography (first the daguerreotype) in the nineteenth century. Having argued that the new innovations arose out of a “need” for immediacy rather than “appearing out of nowhere” (32), Schaefer challenges the supposedly “unmediated” nature of this new technology (42–43), and begins to address how American writers responded to its challenge to perception and cognition whilst reconsidering forms of “immediate experience they deemed trustworthy” (47). She then analyses Emerson's initial perception of photography as “transparent” and charts his efforts to achieve transparency in poetic expression (53).

In the other two chapters of Part I, Whitman is argued to have engaged with the technological restructuring of America in the hope that new technology would not detract from the relevance of literature. Whitman was a photography enthusiast, was himself photographed a lot, and changed the photographs of himself on his books as he aged, as though to promise the reader immediate and present contact with himself (73). Whitman is further described studying catalogues in photograph galleries for their “immersive effect” (90) and, unlike their British counterparts, Emerson and Whitman are argued not to have insisted on the superiority of literature over the new forms of representation, but to have sought to connect literary and social practices by incorporating the immediacy of photography into their writing.

This sets the tone for the book in the sense that, for a reader familiar with American literature, there is little here that is new or original. The content would be highly useful for undergraduates as the fascinating history of American cultural development alongside technology provides useful contexts in which to understand the authors. Part II is much the same in this respect. First, Schaefer examines Gertrude Stein's literary “portraits” in relation to the development of literary modernism and early cinema. Again, there is a concise and clear outline of the contexts which will situate the reader in the historical moment and encourage her to reconsider the consumer of cultural products in the early twentieth century struggling to process societal changes, technological time/space compression and the pace of new urban life. Then Stein's “representational opacity and self-referential seriality” (142) are introduced as modernist techniques that interact with the advent of early cinema. The next chapter is on John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer and his montage and documentary novelistic techniques, looking at the early reception of his work and highlighting the ways in which this novel highlights the “experience of the present” (162) in order to expose the “thoroughly mediated” (167) character of modern life. Any reader familiar with the critical debate around Dos Passos's work will recognize most of the arguments put forth, albeit with occasional references back to this book's central theme of “immediacy.”

In Part III Robert Coover, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo are argued to acknowledge television as a central cultural force. Their texts “first imitate and then dissolve” television's immediacy effects (236). The chapter on Coover refers to the work of McHale, Hutcheon and Hassan. It is essentially “Postmodern Theory 101.” Wallace is argued to engage with television culture and insist on the possibility of sincere interaction despite constant media mediation. However, in a note Schaefer acknowledges that Wallace's “poetics of sincerity” has already been well covered in academic discourse (197). Finally, the chapter on DeLillo's Mao II includes a sharp reading of the character Karen (formerly a “Moonie” member) channel “zapping” (233) without volume, to simulate the effect of being present at reported (past) news events (229). Whilst this does relate to the central theme of “immediacy,” it also simply recapitulates well-trodden ground concerning the ways in which DeLillo's novel highlights Karen's lack of critical perspective, and in the process highlights that it is possible to review and revise viewing practices. Overall, American Literature and Immediacy was an interesting and enjoyable read and will be extremely useful for students of American literature, even if the current reviewer experienced it largely as a “refresher course” rather than a significantly original work.