New mediation, new spatialisation, and contemporary literary form

Abstract

New Mediation, New Spatialisation, and Contemporary Literary Form explores how literature with a particular interest in space, place, and spatial processes has adapted to the Post-Internet meditational environment. Online activity plays a significant role in workaday life, and this impacts on how we construct and inhabit spaces; social life is increasingly dislocated, attention is drawn from immediate surroundings and toward the mobile phone. These processes of construction and inhabitation are essential to non-fictional genres like nature and travel writing, but also to fictional ones like the isolation novel and the urban novel. In this thesis, I attend to these four genres, drawing out relations between shifts in their formal tropes and contemporary Internet-enabled changes to how spaces are produced, navigated, and involved in the processes of everyday life.

In Chapter 1 I show that nature writing is better able to evoke the spatial conditions of Anthropocene ecology with Internet-enabled storytelling through readings of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Common Ground’s Second Nature, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then. In Chapter 2 I read Joanna Walsh’s Break.up and Hotel to suggest that online contact with home disrupts travel writing’s typical parallelling of an interior, psychological journey with an exterior, spatial journey. Chapter 3 shows that spatial isolation must now be navigated alongside online isolation in isolation novels like Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, and Patricia Lockwood’s no one is talking about this. And Chapter 4 demonstrates the double-bind into which writers of urban novels are placed when looking to engage the legacy of the modernist urban novel. Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I first demonstrate that the flâneur is a trope that allowed modernist writers to explore the attentional demands of the city. Then, comparing Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road with Jenny Offill’s Weather and Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists, I show that the writing of flânerie is incompatible with the formal mimesis of contemporary, Internet-effected attentional processes.

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ORCID for Rhys Lawrence: orcid.org/0009-0002-5307-2254

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