eBook - ePub
Profiles and Plotlines
Data Surveillance in Twenty-first Century Literature
- 236 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot points in tales of the political economy.
In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.
In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Profiles and Plotlines by Katherine D. Johnston in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literatura & Crítica literaria. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction
- One. Watching the Watchers: Metadata and Feminist Metafiction in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
- Two. Out of Line: Affective Counterstrategies to Racializing Surveillance and Profile Epistemology in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
- Three. “Both a Gift and a Trap”: Speculative Surveillance and Labor in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
- Four. Data Fictions, Neoliberal Narratives, and the Military-Industrial Gaze in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
- Conclusion: Amazon, Authorship, and Algorithmic Governance
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List