Lecture sponsored by the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English

This talk addresses mainstream literary fiction written by American authors and authors writing about the United States from the time of the Y2K crisis to the onset of Covid-19. Through the lens of literary texts by authors such as Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Kristen Roupenian, and Zadie Smith, it considers the problems and possibilities of digital devices and media that critics say are threatening to eradicate old-media print culture. In doing so, it puts the humanities into conversation with STEM in a way that complements digital humanities scholarship and puts the spotlight on digital humanity: on what it means to be human in the digitizing world.

Speaker bio:

Liliana M. Naydan is associate professor of English at Penn State Abington. She is the author of Flat World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First Century America (U of George P, 2021) and Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (Bucknell UP, 2016). She is co-editor of Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles (Utah State UP, 2018; winner of the 2019 IWCA Outstanding Book Award) and Terror in Global Narrative: Representations of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She lives in the greater Philadelphia area.