Laufendes Habilitationsprojekt: Postdigital Poetics in Contemporary Print Fiction (Arbeitstitel).
Abstract:
The mediascape that has emerged “after digitalization” blurs conventional boundaries between analog and digital, online and offline, and the virtual and the real. As a result, what is conceptually referred to as the “postdigital” (cf. Cramer 2015; Berry/Dieter 2015) in the field of literary writing is characterized by a constitutive ambiguity. Digital technologies have become so deeply interwoven into everyday life that the boundaries between the two are increasingly dissolving, at the same time as they are being highlighted through aesthetic and narrative strategies that probe and exploit this tension.
While variants of electronic and digital literature that address postdigital ambiguity have been extensively analyzed (cf. Hayles 2008; Pressman 2017; Bell/Ensslin 2024), the specific responses of contemporary print fiction to the impact of the digital transformation of culture and society remain markedly under-explored in current scholarship. Seeking to fill this gap, my project investigates how contemporary print novels from Western Europe and North America (2015–present) engage with the postdigital mediascape through innovative formal-aesthetic reconfigurations of traditional narrative structures, and increased levels of media-reflexivity—mirroring the ambivalence at the heart of the postdigital. Mapping the emergence of what I term Postdigital Poetics, this study explores how print fiction imitates or transposes digital mediality and formats, and how such narrative and intermedial strategies operate within the material and medial constraints and affordances of print fiction.
Postdigital Poetics as a narrative mode can be investigated broadly across different genres, themes, and media; this project, however, seeks to foreground one particularly salient constellation. As even a cursory overview of the literary output of recent years will show, print novels that prominently reference the digital sphere also exhibit an intensified thematic concern with questions of belonging and social relations that are characterized by an oscillation between noncommittal virtual proximity and increasing real-world loneliness. Through their analog engagement with the contemporary mediascape, these novels entwine medial with social connectivity. The project highlights this by examining their intermedial strategies and innovative narrative forms, and the way these explore the postdigital ambiguity between the blurring and highlighting of media boundaries. In the process, the study aims to refine existing intermedial and narratological frameworks to better account for the complex response of print fiction to the conditions of the postdigital mediascape, thereby advancing methodological and theoretical approaches to studying contemporary print fiction under the auspices of the postdigital.