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Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the ¿digital banal,¿ not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media.
The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking with the Digital Banal
1. David Fincher’s Grammar of Code
2. Jonathan Lethem’s and Mark Amerika’s Common Writing
3. Being Social in a Postdigital World in Catfish and How Should a Person Be?
4. Twenty Years of Californian Ideology in The Bug and The Circle
5. Refresh, Update, Wait, or, Living with the Digital Banal in Chronic City and Refresh Refresh
6. Speculating on the Real Estate of the Digital Banal
Conclusion: After the Digital Banal
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Zara Dinnen is senior lecturer in contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (2018).
Summary
Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the “digital banal,” not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media. The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.
Additional text
Through an archive of texts that uncover the modes of digital effacement and banality, Dinnen capably shows depictions of both resistance and representation in the face of that obfuscation.
