I can’t help but reflect on the hyper-insistence on novelty resulting from the doubled use of “new” in the title: In the second version of his essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin speaks of “the inestimable value of novelty” for Baudelaire, who looked to newness as a counter to the almost gravitational effect the commodity system had on reifying things. Constant newness was an attempt to dodge that pull towards the debasement of exchange-value: “La nouveauté represents that absolute which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison. It becomes the ultimate entrenchment of art.” Benjamin cites the final poem in Les Fleurs de mal, “Le Voyage,” in which Baudelaire charts the flâneur’s ultimate goal:
    Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! Levons l’ancre!
    Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons! . . .
    Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
But Benjamin knew what Baudelaire missed – newness and commodity are too intertwined for one to outrace the other: “Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor. The fact that art’s last line of resistance should coincide with the commodity’s most advanced line of attack—this had to remain hidden from Baudelaire.”
      Given this collection’s titular stress on the new, especially in terms of words, one might be surprised to find the book start with a quote from Eliot, the modern with perhaps the greatest stake in antiquity. And then, in Grigar’s opening chapter, comes the meditation on Plato. But it all makes sense – again, from Benjamin, the realization that the true test of newness is its oldness, its longitudinal staying-power, its what-will-have-been effect (to use Barber & Grigar’s term): “for [Baudelaire] the proof of modernity seems to be this: it is marked with the fatality of being one day antiquity” (22).
      But what of the new will actually last to antiquity? For example, the novel idea, re-hashed by so many writers in this collection, regarding the death of print? Barber, for example, dismisses print as one of “the old ways . . . awkward . . . ‘text’ as words made to appear on pages” (145), and remarks on the “limits of printed narratives as vehicles for comprehensive, multimodal composition, reality representation” (157). Hawisher & Selfe leave print lying run-over in the rearview mirror, comparing the “transition from an age of print to the age of digitized exchanges” (187) as similar to the passage from orality to print. But I read the pre-digitized, page-arranged words of Cheever and Ashbery and I have to wonder where exactly these limits are. Am I naïve to think their representations of reality are fairly limitless? Is this transition real? Is print’s disppearance actually what will have been? Doubtful, for the notion of the death of print is already a cliché.
      Yve-Alain Bois, for example, writing in the late 1980s, notes the “millenarianist feeling of closure” pervading the era, a mania of “endless diagnoses of death” (30). Even though each of these claims of finality (the death of the author, of the real, of subjectivity, of history, etc.) is unique, they become almost a genre, each discourse sounding a similarly resonant tone – namely, a “claim to be the pure revelation of truth, and the last word about the end” (30). Such phenomena reflect modernism’s need for apocalyptic myth, for finding essence. Significantly, for the C&W audience, Bois sees the techno-industrial shifts in art giving rise to such myths – photography and mass-reproduction evoking the death of painting, for example. Additionally, those shifts result in a new re-focusing on craft, a nostalgic desire to bring back the human element technology seemed to disappear (so, although it may depress, it should come as no surprise when we find techno-rhetoricians holding strongly to old-fashioned stylistic concerns).
      But has the end of painting (print? orality? anything?) actually come to pass? Bois borrows from Damisch to posit that while a given match of, say, painting may be over, the generic game of painting is far from finished. Like painting, print’s “vitality will only be tested once we are cured of our mania and our melancholy, and we believe again in our ability to act in history: accepting our project of working through the end again, rather than evading it through increasingly elaborate mechanisms of defense (this is what mania and melancholy are about) and setting our historical task: the difficult task of mourning” (43). This is what Victor is getting at with his notion of writing (and I think he’d say everything) as “passing” (77). Those caught up in officially marking the death of print, rather than seeing it as a contest always winding down, always ending (a new match ready to begin), might be too caught up in text as form rather than expression.
     But I don't want to quibble: A search for novelty overtakes all serious scholars, and whether the ideas in this collection will be absorbed in antiquity is anyone's guess, but I loved hearing from all these writers, loved mulling over their ideas, loved seeing new means and methods utterly engaged, and particularly loved having such otherwise-would-have-missed-them moments of communication as MOOs, emails, websites, and listservs catalogued for posterity. “Everywhere he sought the transitory, fleeting beauty of our present life,” Baudelaire said of Guys, and I'm grateful to the writers in this collection for their similar search.

-geoff