Coda: Make It Now

Abstract

Here Modernist Fiction and News comes full circle back to the questions with which it began: where and how in the flood of information can experience be located and articulated? Where and how in the endless mass of “happenings” can something like Stein’s “being existing” be represented, and what is the potential value of representing this form of experience? I have defined modernist fiction throughout as that set of texts that first faced with seriousness the new infinite potential of information recording, powerfully emblematized in the expansion and mass production of news narratives from which modernist fiction itself was inseparable. Modernist novels are thus self-conscious archives, both conservative and radical, rev-olutionary and reactionary in the exact same space, texts that at once authorize, sign, conserve, repress, and destroy information in peculiarly tense constellations that are or aspire to be productive of experience. In the preceding chapters, I have tried to read these constellations and their archival projects (and archive fevers) through the shock produced when they arrest and crystallize the stream of information and happenings into experiences of their own.