A theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can...Show moreA theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can productively coexist or that the latter will supplant the former. To make sense of these different views, this thesis will consider the question of how reading skills change on the basis of interrelations between literature and new media. The case-study, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, seems to have a proto-database form while being essentially narrative. It may, therefore, be considered a hybrid between old and new media as well as a reflection of media-literature evolution itself. The novel builds a signification structure into the text that directs the reading direction nonlinearly, allowing for a plurality of voices and ways of looking at the world. Interpreted nonlinearly, Infinite Jest offers an allegory not for reading but precisely for the impossibility thereof. It self-consciously reflects on postmodernism and, specifically, its central thematic of illegibility: it is a novel self-aware of its own impossibility. Infinite Jest diagnoses the illegibility of texts in the age of postmodernism, where one can no longer rely on clear-cut strategies for reading but must employ a creativity in learning how to read as a production rather than a discovery of meaning. Novels like Infinite Jest, it appears, serve as mental practice for new media reading, which requires the reader to switch between reading strategies, or what I coin the modulation proposal, to deal with the phenomenon of ‘information overload.’ Infinite Jest shows that hybridization of narrative and database, or of literature and new media, is a viable – and, hopefully, long-term – possibility for the literature of the future. Literature is right now in the process of adapting itself by borrowing elements from new, digital media, and, re-inventing itself as a form of art that transcends the medium of the book, i.e., literature becomes transmedial. To stay relevant in the age of digital media, literature needs to reinvent itself time and again.Show less
Abstract: This thesis deals with the question of human subjecthood. What makes us Subjects? The innovations in computer science and artificial intelligence prompt a follow up question: When and how...Show moreAbstract: This thesis deals with the question of human subjecthood. What makes us Subjects? The innovations in computer science and artificial intelligence prompt a follow up question: When and how can an artificial intelligence or artificial life form be considered a Subject? In a comparison between man and machine this essay investigates different notions of Subjecthood. Introducing a narratological concept of subjecthood based on Bal’s narratology leads to the conclusion that the subject object division isn’t a binary opposition. Analysing Heidegger’s theory of agency as well as Freud and Lacan their narratives of development in psychoanalytical theory illustrate the importance of a split within the Subject, a split between what it needs and what it learns. The space between internal and external forces in an agent allow a Subject to come into being pointing out how the individual needs society in order to exist.Show less
