It's a pretty sure bet that Michael Wutz's Enduring Words won't hit the best-seller list anytime soon, if at all.

In fact, priced at $49.95, the Weber State University professor's tome will fill more library shelves than bedside reading stands. Its pages are saturated with academic language, filled with terms such as "discursive webs" and "ideological oscillation." Wutz admits that books written by academics like him are invariably read by academics, their arguments rarely spilling over into public discussion.

Shake away all academic language, though, and the message of Wutz's book is that rare voice of optimism amid a chorus of doom. He concludes the humble novel is still surprisingly competitive in popular culture, despite its technological limits. Along the way, he documents and analyzes ways in which novelists and authors have fortified their craft with narrative techniques that incorporate and sometimes even pre-empt elements of photography, recorded sound and film. Like species everywhere, he claims, the book will evolve and survive.

A German native who grew up outside Munich, the 50-year-old Wutz came to the United States to study thanks to the German Academic Exchange Service. After earning his doctorate in modern British and American literature, he taught at the University of Montana in Missoula before taking a post at Weber State University, where he's taught for 17 years.

"The dark, austere landscapes of the American West have long been a great lure for Germans," Wutz said. "Go to any national park in Utah and you can practice your German on tourists."

What's your favorite example of how the novel has incorporated elements of other media?

Novels either reacted, or co-opted, to develop their own irreducible literariness, or what we know as all the elements that define a novel only, and no other media. With the dawn of black-and-white photography in the late 19th century, there was this new kid on the block that novels had to respond to. It was a new 'post-print' world in which writers began responding to a new kind of pressure. Responding to black-and-white photography, narrative suddenly became much more colorful, taking more care to describe color and its effects. Novels also began to smell more, redefining a new territory of representation. They also became louder, working to capture more of the sound spectrum, in response to both the phonograph and urban noise. Frank Norris' McTeague is one of the first 'loud novels,' and when we talk about other novels, such as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , being loud, the same is true of almost every other novel today.

In what ways did the novel anticipate other media?

There are many reciprocities. Film director D.W. Griffith once said that he derived the narrative structure of some of his films in part from the episodic nature of Dickens' novels. But then there are instances when authors become so impressed by the new media of film that they just gave up. Malcolm Lowry, whom many thought of as the heir to James Joyce, had a real crisis of confidence and was unable to finish all his other books after Under the Volcano .

Who are some authors you feel have preserved what you call the "irreducible literariness" of the novel?

Richard Powers, who writes a lot about interesting questions of human cognition and is one of the writers really affirming the continued place of literary fiction in a post-print world. The other is E.L. Doctorow, who celebrates language as one of humanity's great evolutionary accomplishments. It's telling that of the three film scripts he wrote, two sit on the shelf. They're just too literary.

You don't deal too much with the Internet, Google or Amazon.com's Kindle in your book. Why?

It would have required a whole other book to engage those media. It's true that in our digital world, print will have to define itself anew, and people are predicting the death of the novel, but I don't think we're there yet. I'm just not fearful about the death of narrative. The ability to reflect through language and reading provides a medium that allows us as humans to think in an infinity of thought. There's a permanent feedback loop between language and cognition. The Kindle will help rejuvenate the art of reading, so it's not a bad thing. But if human beings have a body, as well as language, then we still have a sense of touch. A book in hand rather than a screen will continue to be important.