CDH Open: Technologies of Self in the Postdigital Novel

Speaker

Denise Wong is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, working on the UKRI project, ‘Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Cognition, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century’. She is also Reviews Co-Editor of C21: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Her work has been published in journals such as Textual Practice, the Journal of Asian American Studies, DIEGESIS and Narrative. She has contributed chapters to the 'Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, Narrative Intersubjectivity and Storyworld Possible Selves', and 'The Routledge Companion to Literature and Cognitive Studies'. Her first monograph, 'Shame in Contemporary You-Narration: Time, Gender, and Race' will be published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2025.

Abstract

The extent to which our contemporary lives are technologically mediated is not only more palpable than ever but also of paramount social and political significance. How has the contemporary novel registered and responded to the shift from passive to participatory forms of new media technologies? And how might this intersect with broader questions concerning the cultivation of one’s self, artistic practice, and creative agency?

The first part of this paper will provide an overview of Michel Foucault’s original coinage, ‘technologies of self’, before making a case for its relevance to the novel. To relate the concept to (post)digitality, I will survey some of the ways the novel form has evolved alongside the fast-changing media landscape that has, in turn, given rise to new disciplinary approaches, from transmedial narratology (Ryan and Thon 2014; Ensslin and Bell 2021) and multimodal narrative analysis (Page 2010; Gibbons 2012; Nørgaard 2018, 2023; Ghosal 2021) to fan fiction studies (Lewis 1992; Grant and Love 2019).

The second half of the paper examines postdigital aesthetics in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) before proposing a provisional framework for the analysis of technologies of self in the novel at the level of story and discourse as well as its surrounding metadiscourse.

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