Preliminary communication
Cyber-d Subjects: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
Nupur Mittal
orcid.org/0000-0002-1173-4275
; E-927, Saraswati Vihar, Delhi, India
Abstract
In recent times, concerns have been raised by writers, and others associated with the literary field, about the fact that the novel may be a dying art and that the habit of reading among the general populace is on the decline. One of the key reasons cited for the same is the emergence of the cyberspace, which offers a number of options for leisure time activities that compete with reading for the attention of the masses. Furthermore, it is commonly argued that the cyberspace has impacted and altered people’s psyches as the information overload and ready access to various modes of entertainment cause people to lose the capacity to maintain focus for an extended period of time on any one particular task. This also, purportedly, causes people to become more and more reliant on machines to do their everyday tasks, their thinking for them. Such concerns are highlighted in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Gary Shteyngart’s A Super Sad True Love Story (2010), both of which are set in dystopic societies where people use their devices as crutches to enable them to navigate the world. These anxieties, this paper will argue, are caused by shifts in the literary fields which have been brought on by increasing possibilities in terms of creation, dissemination, and reading of texts in the internet age. These misgivings, therefore, will be framed and unpacked to understand and highlight their ideological underpinnings.
Keywords
Cyberspace; novel; social media; human subject; embodiment
Hrčak ID:
174180
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2016.
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