Narrativising information in twenty-first-century fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines how certain digital principles of organising information have come to organise analog aspects of lived experience in the twenty-first century, and how contemporary Anglophone fiction engages with these transformations both thematically and formally. I argue that writers, through their creative and critical responses to information technologies, develop an (anti-)informatic aesthetics to illuminate the pervasive influence of the informational milieu – now a naturalised habitus – and to denaturalise the digital visions of reality. The introduction outlines how information in the twenty-first century has been reconfigured and become pre-semiotic, and argues that novels re-semioticise digital information by revisiting historical informational genres such as grids and lists recontextualised in digital environments. Chapter one traces the historical trajectory of grids as geometric tools for translating continuous space into discrete, manageable information, and examines how today’s network culture updates this technique through reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Chapter two compares Zadie Smith’s NW and Virginia Woolf’s writings to contrast twenty-first-century pixel-based satellite vision with twentieth-century aerial perspectives. Introducing the concept of ‘informational imaging’, the chapter explores how informationalisation reconfigures spatiality and human desires. Chapter three shifts focus to the temporal dimension of informationalisation by reading Ben Lerner’s 10:04. It juxtaposes scenario planning with Lerner’s poetics of virtuality, critiquing the reduction of the future to quantifiable data and emphasising the radical potential of indeterminacy. Finally, chapter four maps a relationship between information and literature through Ali Smith’s two novels, The Accidental and There but for the. I suggest that literature affords a more expansive communicative channel, embracing elements and voices excluded by systematic, positivist, and reductive information regimes. I conclude that these novels collectively navigate a new mechanised reality, and create an ‘analog effect’ to signify the impossibility of total informationalisation and to envision alternative ways of relating to the world.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	James Purdon (Supervisor)