Very Online Novels (Seminar, ACLA, April 8-11, 2021)
This seminar asks how novels (and the novel form) have absorbed the internet and how (or if) they can reflect it back to us?
Increasingly, our lives—from work to leisure to grocery shopping—run according to the fractured, eternally scrolling, continuously interrupted rhythms of online. While the pandemic has exacerbated this tendency for some (and introduced it to others), platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have long shaped and structured not only our lives, but also our dreams and desires. Alongside this has come the maturation of the “very online” identity, fluent in the memes and vernacular of social media, cynical and ironic, but also performatively vulnerable, constantly joking but not joking.