Network Aesthetics
Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture

The intersections of new media and literature have received much attention during the last two or three decades. Consider work by Lori Emerson, Dene Grigar, N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Janet Murray, Alondra Nelson, Jessica Pressman, and Alexander Weheliye, to name a few. Patrick Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics adds to this conversation a focused and original analysis of networks, which are notoriously difficult to define, let alone study from a cultural perspective. Interpreting everything from novels, films, and television (“linear forms”) to videogames and alternate reality games (“distributed forms”), Network Aesthetics identifies and examines five types of aesthetics: maximal, emergent, realist, participatory, and improvisational. This framework alone is a significant contribution to media and literary studies, and it further exhibits how the two fields inform each other. Since it will prove quite useful to an array of teaching and research projects across the humanities, I will do my best here to...