Internet Writing: Technology and Contemporary Fiction

Catalog description

In a world of accelerating and abstract information, how is literature supposed to render sensations that, in David Foster Wallace’s terms, are “just too fast and huge and all interconnected” to do more than barely “sketch”? This course will address how literature has become situated in a vastly interconnected technological system, represented most notably by the Internet and its related innovations. We will ask: how does an increasing reliance on mediated systems for romantic fulfilment, economic stability, and self-definition manifest in literary art? How might literature depict relationships on “chat” networks, financial drama tied to fluid shifts in global capital, or identities forged through digital modifications? Can literature function like an Internet virus, an unrequited DM? This course will survey fiction from roughly the last three decades, tracing the charged relationship between technology and literary expression, culminating in the Internet as a shared, epochal phenomenon. Fiction works will span from cyberpunk premonitions of the Internet in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (the origin of the term “cyberspace”), to the mundane side of online millennialism in Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel. Along the way, we’ll read Amie Barrodale on tracking web paramours (“William Wei”), Don DeLillo on global capital run amok (Cosmopolis), David Foster Wallace on broadcast trauma (“The Suffering Channel”), and graphic novels depicting squalid, yet virtually supercharged urban landscapes (Ghost in the Shell and Transmetropolitan). We will also touch on science fiction, including work by Alice B. Sheldon and Samuel Delany, employing images of the “cyborg” to presciently address issues of gender, race, and sexuality through a “posthuman” lens. The course will entail regular blackboard posts, a midterm paper, and either a final paper or creative final project.