The Digital Banal

New Media and American Literature and Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID19936798
AuthorsZara Dinnen (corresponding author)
Year2018
Publication date2018-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDigital Banal (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherColumbia University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7312/dinn18428
OpenAlexW2810420406
ISBN9780231545402
Open LibraryOL35826496M
LanguageEN
Citations received9

"Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. In its ubiquity digital media have become increasingly banal and in the process its meaning and influence have become less visibly apparent. Contemporary novelists and filmmakers have narrated and depicted everyday life in a way- that represents the emotional, intellectual, and political nature of living in our present-day media environment. The works of these writers and directors, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies. Dinnen considers the work of a range of prominent contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists, including Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, David Fincher, Mark Amerika, and Cory Arcangel. Their works critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; how creative remixing allows the writer or filmmaker the opportunity to expose what often becomes shrouded in the digital banal; self-representation through avatars; and the development of the "California ideology," which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane"

Art · Digital culture · Digital media · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Digital Games and Media · Law · 21st century · American literature · Banality (Philosophy) · History and criticism · Social aspects · Technology in literature · Technology in motion pictures

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