Big books in times of big data / Inge van de Ven.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ven, Inge van de, author.

Contributor:

J. Bertram Lippincott Library Fund.

Series:

Media / Art / Politics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--Data processing.

Fiction.

Fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Sagas--History and criticism.

Sagas.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

251 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

[Leiden] : Leiden University Press, [2019]

Summary:

This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the present. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven recuperates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book - as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power. 0Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Monumentality and the Novel: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century p. 25

Chapter 2 A Sublime of Data: Information Overload between the Covers p. 47

Chapter 3 Narratives of the Database: Between Counting and Recounting p. 69

Chapter 4 Quantified Selves: Monumental Autobiography in the Facebook Age p. 91

Chapter 5 Growing Women, Shrinking Men? Gender, Scale, Materiality p. 115

Chapter 6 Can the Novel Trump the TV Series? Competing Media in the Post-television Stage p. 137

Chapter 7 The Book-as-World-as-Book: Analog Novels and Geographical Information Systems p. 165

Chapter 8 Slow Reading, Materiality, and Mediacy: How Books Withstand Real-Time and Binging p. 187.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-245) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the J. Bertram Lippincott Library Fund.

ISBN:

9789087283377

9087283377

OCLC:

1109882385

Publisher Number:

99984435039