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Full Text (PDF) Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation: Contemporary American Fiction on/of the Information Age and the Potentials of (Post)Humanist Narrative Regina Schober ABSTRACT This essay examines four contemporary American novels on the information age and its ef- fects on (post)human identity and agency, transformations of knowledge, a changed media envi- ronment, and the role of America in transnational geopolitical complexities: Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply (2009), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013). The four novels mark a recent trend in contemporary fiction in displaying a “metamodern” ambivalence between resist- ing a data-driven consumer culture while at the same time incorporating new media aesthetics and thus expressing a pragmatic willingness to adapt to such a culture (Vermeulen and van den Akker). By doing so, the novels stage themselves as new media’s complementary ‘other’ that both critically observes and fills the voids left by an informational media culture. Contemporary American novels commenting on a global information age are faced with a major dilemma: On the one hand, they try to make sense of a world particularly shaped by the complex flows of information and an “information technology paradigm” that pervades all processes of individual and collective ex- istence (Castells 70–71). On the other hand, such narratives critically reflect their own status in a changing media landscape, which (seemingly) threatens their ex- istence. In this essay, I will explore narrative modes and cultural functions of four recent American novels on/of the information age: Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply (2009), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013). These novels explore the impact of digital media on human (self)conceptualizations, cul- tural values, and the function of language and knowledge in a contemporary me- dia environment. Written during the consolidation of Web 2.0 practices and the looming of a ‘big data’ epistemology, the four novels create possible scenarios of human-technology interaction in our present age, while implicitly commenting on their own function as an integral part of and as largely affected by such a culture. My analysis will proceed in three steps: First, I will examine how these narra- tives respond to and interact with the increasing practices of tracing, tracking, and mapping (posthumanist) identity. Second, I will investigate the functions of nar- rative within an epistemological culture and politics of increasing data visibility in relation to the ‘right to ignorance.’ Third, I will discuss the value of fiction in a seemingly disembodied culture. I will do so on the assumption that these novels are representative of certain tendencies in contemporary American fiction: First, they exhibit an ambivalent attitude towards the information age, both warning 360 Regina Schober against its dehumanizing effects, while displaying a particularly ‘American’ af- finity to new technology in embracing the new media’s potential.1 Second, fol- lowing Janet Abbate’s observation that “the meaning of the Internet had to be invented—and constantly reinvented—at the same time as the technology itself,” they are fundamental in constructing our concept of the internet (6). These narra- tives “actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 21), thus par- ticipating in “mak[ing] it new” (Chun, “Did Somebody Say New Media?” 3). Nar- ratives render new media readable, making them relevant by transforming pure information into contextual knowledge. Third, in embodying technology’s and/ or new media’s ‘other,’ they demonstrate a certain degree of resistance due to an increasing sense of existential anxiety, celebrating what Jessica Pressmann calls “the aesthetics of bookishness” as an “emergent literary strategy” of contempo- rary fiction to respond to a long discourse of the end of the book (465). Thus, they reflect a paradoxical moment in American literary culture, one that is marked by an apocalyptic sentiment, on the one hand, and an increased “longing for the literary experience” in the digital age, on the other (Collins 14). Discourses of the end of print novels (and the ‘death’ of the human, for that matter) coincide with a self-fashioning as the new media’s ‘other,’ as ‘embodied’ forms of informational organization superior to what Lev Manovich calls “the modular, numerical, and variable logic of the database” (228). Although the novels give different answers to these questions, they share a sense of urgency in their address, displaying awareness of their own literariness, which is (seemingly) at stake by the media developments portrayed. At the same time, the novels acquire a new sense of legitimacy through their shared gesture of defiance and self-assertion. In view of the ambivalence displayed towards these narratives, Alan Liu’s concept of “narratives of new media encounter” (2007) proves helpful. Accordingly, these narratives create spaces of a “thick, unpredictable zone of con- tact—more borderland than border line—where (mis)understandings of new me- dia are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors,” resulting in “unpredictable,” “reversible,” and fundamentally “messy” accounts (Liu 5, 9, 14). Furthermore, I claim that these four novels form part of a “metamodern” trend in contemporary fiction, an ambivalent negotiation between a modernist narrative of progress and a postmodernist distrust in such metanarratives (Vermeulen and van den Akker). “Increasingly abandoning tactics such as pastiche and parataxis for strategies like myth and metaxis, melancholy for hope, and exhibitionism for en- gagement,” contemporary fiction is marked by a pragmatic inconsistency between modernist techno-euphoria and a postmodernist skepticism towards human agen- cy in increasingly complex information environments (5). In their metamodern- ist aesthetics, the four novels thus only partly represent what John Johnston calls the postmodern “novel of information multiplicity” (3).2 Rather, they mark a new 1 As Paul Youngman has noted in his study on German fiction, American novels tend to ex- press less apprehension towards computer technology and the Internet than do German novels (3). 2 By “novels of information multiplicity,” Johnston refers to postmodern novels that reflect on a culture increasingly dominated by information technology and discourses influenced by Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 361 tendency in reflecting informational discourses by acknowledging the posthuman as an inevitable truth rather than deprecating it as a futuristic specter. To a much lesser degree than postmodern novels do they use metatextual strategies to reflect on their own status as information systems with an inherently inscribed dynamics of proliferating multiplicity. Instead, they exhibit a particularly delicate relation- ship with the new media, oscillating between nostalgia for a bygone past and a pragmatic acceptance of a new media environment. Displaying an “unsuccessful negotiation between culture and nature,” these novels neither express a belief in the future nor do they believe in the end of the future, but they rather incorporate a metamodernist awareness that “history […] is moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 7, 2). The four novels map out possible spaces of new media encounter for the indi- vidual, locating human agency in shifting dynamics of knowledge production and human-machine interaction. The protagonists are often left disoriented and disil- lusioned; yet they try to adapt to and appropriate digital media technology into their own frameworks of meaning making. Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply centers around the (implicit) protagonist Hayden White who constantly re-invents him- self by using stolen identities. Employing an unmistakable intertextual reference to historian Hayden White, renowned for his theory on the “emplotment” of his- torical narratives, the novel rather blatantly positions itself within a constructivist discourse (280). The interlocking narratives of Hayden’s multiple personalities only gradually reveal his schizophrenic self and thus evoke questions of the condi- tions and the desire of self-knowledge in a world in which the boundaries between real and virtual have dissolved, creating complicated narratives of vagueness and evoking a new desire for a materially grounded ‘truth.’ Such a celebration of mate- riality is also central to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. A classical network narrative, the novel assembles loosely-interconnected stories about indi- viduals working in and around the music industry in a non-linear sequence.3 What connects the different characters is a sense of nostalgia, most eminently embodied by music manager and ‘connector’ Bennie Salazar who, out of a sense of longing for a pre-digital era of music making, stages a final revival concert for aging rock musician Scotty Hausmann. Such a nostalgic attachment to a bygone media age is also at the core of Gary Shteyngart’s satirical novel Super Sad True Love Story. The novel’s protagonist information theory and cybernetics by “registering the world as a multiplicity and by articulat- ing new multiplicities through novel orderings and
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