Contemporary American fiction in the embrace of the digital age / edited by Béatrice Pire, Arnaud Regnauld, Pierre-Louis Patoine.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Pire, Béatrice, editor.

Regnauld, Arnaud, editor.

Patoine, Pierre-Louis, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction.

Technology in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (228 p.)

Place of Publication:

Brighton ; Portland : Sussex Academic Press, 2022.

Summary:

This collection aims to examine the relationship between American fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine our world, interact with each other and understand the human being in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are these recent advances changing language and literature? How is fiction transformed by technological progress and what representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In a context where software can generate literary works, can the force of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars here investigate the American fiction of Russel Banks, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.

Contents:

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction: Living and Writing within the New Imperatives of Technology

Béatrice Pire, Pierre-Louis Patoine, and Arnaud Regnauld

1. Updating the Future to the Present: The Reboot of Cyberpunk as Social Criticism in Mr. Robot, The Centenal Cycle and Blade Runner 2049

Olga Thierbach-McLean

2. American Fiction in the Age of Biotechnology: Richard Powers's Orfeo, Michael Crichton's Next and Paolo Bacigulpi's The Windup Girl

Lejla Kucukalic

3. Technologies of Storytelling at the End of the World: Rethinking Technology in Sam J. Miller's Blackfish City

Héloïse Thomas

4. Karl Kraus, Jonathan Franzen, Purity and Transparency

Béatrice Pire

5. Streams of Cyber-consciousness: Tao Lin's Inquiry into the Digital Self

Sophie Chapuis

6. A Pilgrim's Progress for the Digital, Post-Human(ist) Age?: Computer Technology, Pornography, and Allegorical Representation in Russell Banks's Lost Memory of Skin

David Buehrer

7. The American Zeitgeist in Don DeLillo's "Hammer and Sickle"

Aliette Ventéjoux

8. David Foster Wallace's Oblivion and the Limits of Technology

Jessica Hallen Hanssen

9. Literacy, Critique and Effectin Kenneth Goldsmith's 'Radio' Books

Yves Abrioux

10. Technological Anxiety in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City

Camelia Raghinaru

11. Paranoia of (Dis) Connection: Mediation and Corporality in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jason Shrontz

The Editors and Contributors

Index

Back Cover

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Pire, Béatrice Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age

ISBN:

1-78284-712-X

OCLC:

1290019093