The Novel and the Internet

What happens to the novel in the age of the internet? What happens to concepts such as narration, character, movement, plot, time, space, setting, behavior, motivation, and ideology? Is online action representable in a novelistic form? How does the internet affect novelistic events such as deferred knowledge, revelation, unreliable narration? How has it transformed the concept of fictionality? Do AI technologies pose a threat to the integrity of the novel or simply exploit qualities that are intrinsic to the form? Is an epistolary novel possible over email? This course will survey a range of fictional practices that engage or dramatize these questions primarily (though not solely) from the age of the internet. Authors include Jennifer Egan, Dennis Cooper, Herman Melville, Tao Lin, Sheila Heti, and critics and theorists including Chun, Da, Flusser, Okotie, Shechtman, Volosinov, and Zuboff.