ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the loose field of scholarly work that reads literature as one of many cultural sites that give aesthetic and affective form to digital and computational culture. Despite technical and historical definitions, the term digital is persistently opaque. The digital refers to the sociotechnical situation of distributed networks of electromechanical computing; not only personal and mass, but nonhuman and infrastructural. The digital recorder, and its mobilization as embodied agency, temporarily makes the novel itself unworkable. Common communication is a banal investment, where the banal is an effect of refusing to register novelty. In Nicoline Timmer’s account of post-postmodernism, one of the dominant critical investments of this new literary genre is sharing. ’In the post-postmodern novel “sharing” is important; for example sharing stories as a way to “identify with others”. Timmer frames this in terms of writing by Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, which conscientiously, but anxiously, presents the act of voicing others’ stories as ethically vital.
