Liliana M. Naydan – författare

Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction considers the way in which contemporaryAmerican authors address the subject of belief in the post-9/11 Age of Terror. Naydansuggests that after 9/11, fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Laila Halaby, Philip Roth, DonDeLillo, John Updike, and Barbara Kingsolver dramatizes and works to resolve impassesthat exist between believers of different kinds at the extremes. These impasses emergeout of the religious paradox that shapes America as simultaneously theocratic andsecular, and they exist, for instance, between liberals and fundamentalists, betweenliberals and certain evangelicals, between fundamentalists and artists, and betweenfundamentalists of different varieties. Ultimately, Naydan argues that these authorsfunction as literary theologians of sorts and forge a relevant space beyond or betweenextremes. They fashion faith or lack thereof as hybridized and hence as a negotiationamong secularism, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, and fanaticism. In so doing, theyinvite their readers into contemplations of religious difference and new ways ofmemorializing 9/11.

This is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examines the historical, political, and social significance of 9/11.