The Novel And/As/Of Information
From Henry James to Virginia Woolf, a major preoccupation of the novel in the first quarter of the twentieth century was the depiction of consciousness. One hundred years later, the preoccupation has shifted to the problem the processing and management of information, as new technologies like smart phones, search engines, social media, wearables, online encyclopedias and marketplaces, and now generative AI have become unavoidable features of contemporary life and thus of fictional and semi-fictional representations of contemporary life. Literary criticism has already begun to theorize this issue, primarily through the lens of genre, coining such terms as “uncreative writing,” “the internet novel,” “the information epic,” and “Wikipedia realism” to capture the way the new epistemic and discursive modes made possible by these technologies has infiltrated the work of twenty-first century writers from Alexander Kluge to Rachel Kushner. In my talk, “The Novel And/As/Of Information,” I will revisit Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” alongside Gertrude Stein’s article on “Normal Motor Automatisms” and her late “Reflections on the Atom Bomb,” to historicize these generic classifications, recounting the constitutive and conflictual relationship between “storytelling” and “information” in the history of the novel.
Date: 15 May 2025, 16:45
Venue: Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Venue Details: Downstairs Seminar Room
Speaker: Ryan Ruby
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers: Professor Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford), Professor Nicole King (University of Oxford)
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu