The Grounding and Absurdism of Digital Technology in Contemporary American Literature.

My thesis argues that depictions of digital technology in contemporary American novels are simultaneously grounding and absurd. By applying Rorty's (1979) post-foundationalist theory that in the humanities an assertion of a truth is more important than empirical truth, the project will analyse the 'truth' of literary depictions of online personas and communications.

I will deploy research on 'digitally facilitated' relationships to events (Kharouf, 2020) to argue that digital technology's mediating presence (Hayles, 1999) in contemporary literature paradoxically exaggerates the corporeal while loosening fixed notions of selfhood. I will also build on critical perspectives suggesting that digital technology has become so ubiquitous it has become functionally banal (Dinnen, 2018).

The focus of the thesis on contemporary American novels will provide unique insights into the diverse impacts of the current, advanced phase of digitization, enabling me to reassess posthuman ideas (Hayles 1999) that dominate earlier approaches to digital media. The thesis will assess how digitization has pushed American novelists to utilise augmented fractured expressions of selfhood seemingly at odds with the parameters of the novel mode, while contributing to a broader conversation about public concerns surrounding the role of technology.

I will apply Human Computer Interaction's (HCI) modelling of users to help to decode what novels teach us about users' perception of technology (Wobbrock et al., 2016).

For my primary texts, I will analyse eight contemporary American novels interested in technology, written by different authors between 2002 and 2021: Dave Eggers, Ross Goodwin, Patricia Lockwood, Ramez Naam, Jenny Offill, Richard Powers, Ellen Ullman, and Roger Williams. This diverse group of writers are carefully chosen for their critical and geographical distance from the Silicon Valley hub that tends to dominate discourses of human-computer interaction.

These primary texts evidence the ways in which digital technology creates an absurd hyperreality that represents a tantalising but arguably illusionary escape from the complexities of modern American life. The texts will also be supported by a range of digital publications, collated during a trip to Stanford University to consult its 'Computer Science @ Stanford' exhibition and materials in its Silicon Valley Archive.

The project's key research questions include:

How does the presentation of digital technology in contemporary American novels contribute to our understanding of diverse experiences in the 21st century? How does digital technology's conversion, creation, and duplication of data impact how we craft narratives?

Why is it critical for literature-based researchers to evaluate the theoretical importance of the digital humanities as we contend with the prevalence of digital cultures? How do we demystify digital technologies conflicting role as an anchor to reality and an absurd escape from it?

To address these questions, I will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to analyse technology's chimera-like presence as fact, symbol, and myth in my diverse group of novels. Applying theoretical trends in the digital humanities and HCI research to a literary study will allow me to approach questions of form and selfhood from new perspectives. These perspectives will be nurtured by the multimedia research culture at my host universities, specifically the Institute of Digital Cultures at Leicester and the Centre for Digital Cultures at Birmingham.