ABSTRACT
Jennifer Egan’s work traces shifting perceptions of time, memory and technological change in the contemporary era, offering keenly observed and often prescient insights into American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Egan’s reference to ‘tingling awarenesses’ sparked by possible stories indicates a crucial aspect of her literary approach: the tendency to unlayer characters’ lives by offering a series of brief, intense glimpses of significant moments. In moments of narrative anticipation and recollection, Egan uses descriptions of shared objects recurring across time to draw connections between events and characters. Egan’s use of PowerPoint and Twitter explores the creative possibilities of new technological media, in her most formally experimental pieces of writing to date. By combining nostalgic sentimentality with pitilessly direct declarations of character’s fates, Egan’s writing demonstrates how the ‘anticipation of retrospection’ can be rendered bittersweet by a reader’s foreknowledge of impending disaster.
