Image from Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014)
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"Scenario Fiction and the Novel Claims of Insurance," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56.3 (forthcoming, 2023)
"Scenario Fiction and the Novel Claims of Insurance," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56.3 (forthcoming, 2023)
Abstract: Emerging during a Cold War era of nuclear uncertainty, refined in decades of neoliberal turbulence, and used today for modeling climate futures, scenario thinking has now entered the domain of the Anthropocene novel. This article argues for the adoption of scenarios as a formal strategy of two contemporary realist novels engaged in updating the genre to present scales of crisis: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). As these two novels process new forms of risk in a time of epochal fracture, they likewise signal a conceptual break in realism’s capacity to imagine new configurations for the present based on the shape of things past. Scenarios prioritize plausibility over predictability, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in processing a new age of planetary crisis while also showing the limits of statistical methods of world-building. By attending to the many configurations that could emerge from the volatile state of the present, scenario fiction seeks to pre-empt unmediated outcomes and insure the novel’s critical extension into all possible futures.
"Cyborg Storytelling: Virtual Embodiment in Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box.'" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 61.3 (2020).
"Cyborg Storytelling: Virtual Embodiment in Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box.'" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 61.3 (2020).
Abstract: Responding to criticism that Jennifer Egan’s 2012 Twitter story “Black Box” was a failed social media experiment, this paper argues for its critical bearing on contemporary cultural and literary concerns, including theories of new humanism, the value of beauty as an ethical dimension of art, and the role of storytelling in the digital age. The story’s dystopic future world refigures technological mediation of the self as a deeply political and ambiguously ethical act. Though lacking in the type of formal play we might expect from a Twitter story, “Black Box” mobilizes traditional storytelling conventions within a non-traditional medium as a means of bringing distracted digital readers into a reflexive relationship with their own modes of technological embodiment. In this way, “Black Box” does more than tell a story about human experience in the digital age; it actively contributes to such experience and serves as a kind of treatise for a new mode of online, cyborg storytelling.
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