Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Technology, and Cognition in the Twenty-First Century

Within contemporary cultural studies, theorists increasingly detect a movement away from postmodernism's playful self-reflexivity to a more sincere, ethically conscious, and politically engaged form of post postmodernist metafictional play. In the gap left by postmodernism's apparent departure, "digimodernism", "metamodernism", "cosmodernism", and "post-postmodernism" have all been proposed as successors. While these perspectives each rest on a slightly different argument, the common idea behind them all is that the ironic self-reflexive devices associated with postmodernist art are no longer used to alienate the reader/viewer by exposing the artificiality of all narratives. Rather, post-postmodernist culture emotionally engages the audience with very specific moral, ethical, and political issues that are relevant to the real world. Within literary studies, scholarship on fiction after postmodernism has tended to focus on text-based literary fiction published in print. However, what is missing from that context is a thorough investigation into how digital media - as a manifestation of the current technological epoch and thus a prime locus of contemporary culture - are explored in and exploited by post-postmodernist forms of art. Moreover, while research often speculates about the effect of post-postmodernist fiction on readers, claims about reader responses to post-postmodernist fictions have not been thoroughly empirically tested.

In seeking to fill these gaps in research, this project will investigate the prevalence, distinctiveness, and audience reception of what we define as "Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital" (PPFDs), i.e., contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate, and/or utilise digital media, and display a thematic concern with the ethical implications of digital technology for society. In this project we limited our investigation to PPFDs written in English. Some PPFDs, such as Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012) and Herman Wouk's The Lawgiver (2012) combine prose text with other semiotic modes such as visually represented e-mails, text messages, Skype transcripts, memos, online forums, tweets, and blogs. Other PPFDs, such as Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen (2012) and Marisha Pessl's Night Film (2013), take the reader beyond the printed novel to additional material on related websites, apps, or social media platforms.

The project will propose the new category of PPFD, create a catalogue of PPFDs, develop of a new typology of PPFDs, and examine the distinct and congruent ways that digital media is utilised semiotically, structurally, ontologically, and thematically PPFDs. The moral and ethical implications of PPFDs will also be investigated via a reader response research program which combines close readings of PPFDs with the analysis of associated reader data. Three empirical studies will be designed and delivered to assess the effects of post-postmodernist self-reflexivity with data gathered from online review sites, reading group discussions, and individual questionnaire responses. Overall, the project is thus designed to understand the self-reflexive ethics of PPFDs and to determine how the use of digital media impacts cognition. Project outputs include: a website, social media account, an open access catalogue of PPFDs, conference papers, journal articles, workshops, public lectures, and reader response datasets.