Digital Sociability in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

The effects of digital culture on social relations is a contentious subject, intersecting with theoretical issues ranging from posthumanity to the experience of life with old and new media.

This thesis first establishes conversation as a central fantasy of sociability and the novel as a portrait and site of sociability. By discussing the interplay between sociability, digital culture and contemporary fiction, it then asks what relational modes emerge. To answer this question, the four chapters examine four underexplored modes of sociability that are particular to the discursive history surrounding cyberspace and digital sociability: cosmopolitanism, anonymity, aggregation and affinity. Through this examination, the chapters explore contemporary fiction’s critical ambivalence towards new, or renewed, forms of social relation. In doing so, the thesis argues that the world-making and world-challenging poetics represented in the novel mediates each mode of sociability while, in turn, each mode features as a condition of the novel.

Chapter one on digital cosmopolitanism reads The Circle by Dave Eggers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki through the digital and relational language of the ‘click’ as demonstrative of interiority and unity between characters. The second chapter on anonymity argues that I Hate the Internet by Jarret Kobek and Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte use anonymity to place the novels’ fictions in a literary and digital genealogy, exploring how the novels mediate network relations as a result. Chapter three argues that the digital aggregate is a metonymy for digital sociability, and that Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow respond to this through the emergence of mercy and forgiveness as a satirical countermove and a parody of sincerity, which relies on the databased infrastructure of novels. In chapter four I show how affinity is deferred in feminist and new media theory, before demonstrating the ways in which this deferral occurs through heterosexual desire under the patriarchy in Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta and Summer of Hate by Chris Kraus. In sum, I argue that contemporary fiction is oriented towards sociability in a way that reveals how cosmopolitanism, anonymity, aggregation and affinity represent a latent ongoing hope for community that recalls the technological ethos of the early days of cyberspace, while simultaneously facing the limits of techno-solutionism.

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