The Evolutions of Modernist Epic by Václav Paris (review)

Abstract

When I looked for books by non-white authors that engage in the same kind of metamedial contemplations of the novel and the book, none of them did quite what Panko describes. In fact, many of them—Dionne Brand’s Theory, for example, or Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, both experimental and metamedial novels in their own right3—are concerned with the invisibility of their subjects to the very systems attempting to capture them. This perspective (which, arguably, is evident in Ulysses as well) pushes back against the novel as an archival genre or, rather, considers the colonial violence of archives and thus strategically attempts to elude their contextualizing force. Indeed, considering that Joyce was writing from a perspective of contingent whiteness in a moment of his nation’s revolution from colonialism, Ulysses’s place as the starting point of this study invites a turn to authors who are similarly marginalized by regimes of power. Ultimately, my own desire to push beyond Panko’s case studies, to extend this theorization into different texts, is, in fact, a recognition of Out of Print’s efficacy: I am drawn to think alongside and against this book. But I remain wary about any theorizing of informationmanagement systems that excludes the perspectives of those who have been most harmed by these very systems.