Narrative Negotiations: Literary Ficion in an Information Age

Description

My PhD ‘Narrative Negotiations: Literary Fiction in an Information Age', from which my roundtable material will be derived, deals with printed novels that want to tell a story, but at the same time display an uneasy feeling towards the well-rounded narrative form; as if it works against them, prohibiting them from being able to say what they want to say and causes them to take up other means of representation derived from the world of information technology (such as database, hyperlink, computer game), which may be described as embodying collage or montage techniques.

In the reading of these novels I return to Galen Strawson's claim that there ‘are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative' (Strawson, 2004). In Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007) Barbara Maria Stafford takes this a step further by arguing that Strawson's thesis of the existence of an episodic self which does not string life into an ongoing story, but feel that what is remembered did not necessarily happened to the same self as that which is now present is supported by neuroscientific research. By employing the figures of the database, the hyperlink, and the computer game the novels looked at in this study articulate the simultaneity of a narrative and a non-narrative impetus in human perception. This allows us to understand the narrative negotiation, with which I am occupied, as linked to the faculty of sensory perception and cognitive processing, at the same time as my study also shows that information technology accentuates the resistance towards well-rounded narratives by providing a vocabulary for articulating this through the appropriation of figures such as the database, the hyperlink, and the computer game.