Introduction: American Literature and Digital Technology in the New Millennium -- Relationships with Technology in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story and Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" -- Searching History in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad -- The Digital Divine in Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am -- Cybercapitalism in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and Dave Eggers's The Circle -- National Divides and Digitization in Zadie Smith's "Meet the President!" and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West -- Conclusion: Flat-World Fiction and the Textured Future.
Summary:
"This book analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about America in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens, threatened by it, and also attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. These authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, they complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists. They create accessible, literary roadmaps to our digital future"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.