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Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature

Edited by Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi

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£95.00

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About this book

Studies literature’s role in representing and addressing dis/trust in the digital world

  • Provides the first account of literature’s role in representing and addressing trust and distrust in the digital world
  • Brings together three distinct but mutually informative fields of study: literature, technology, and trust
  • Addresses prominent concerns: artificial intelligence, deepfakes and the digital image, cryptocurrencies and the digital economy, the public sphere in the digital age
  • Offers an original theorisation of the notion of ‘dis/trust,’ especially in considering what it means to dis/trust the digital technologies we use every day
  • Includes original readings of literary and popular writers including Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Viktor Pelevin, Thomas Pynchon, Sally Rooney, Brandon Sanderson, and Zadie Smith

How has the advent of digital technology impacted social and institutional trust? And how can imaginative literature help us to answer this question? Impelled by this dual inquiry, Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature addresses the intersections among digital studies, literary studies and studies of trust and distrust. Approaching the contemporary age through the longue durée of literary tradition, the volume is particularly concerned to identify the special affordances of literature for approaching problems of dis/trust in the digital world. Readers will be informed about topical subjects and urgent issues, including the impact of digital technologies on the (literary) public sphere, the status of the digital image and the threat of deepfakes, the emergence of cryptocurrencies and the digital economy, and the AI revolution. Each chapter approaches these topics and issues through the lens of literary texts while also considering how the ways we think about literature are changing in the digital age.

Reviews

This volume brings together hard thinking on literature and a key problem of our time: that of public (dis)trust. It synthesises helpful-but-fragmented existing reflections on these intersecting fields in a timely companion on digitisation, trust and literary writing. In sound analyses, the authors – high-profile scholars in fields ranging from data science via political economy to literary and film studies – persuasively demonstrate that in digitised times imaginative literature matters, perhaps, more than ever.
Table of contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature
Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi

Part I. Dis/Trusting Authority and Digital Publics
1.Trust and Authenticity in the Age of Infinite Data
William Davies
2. Trust Me, I’m an Author: Literary Publicness in the Digital World
Daniel South
3. ‘A Cartesian Howl’: Trusting the Un/Reliable Human in Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill
Rhona Jamieson
4. Trust and Authorship in Brandon Sanderson’s Fiction and Fandom
Caitlin Smith and Trenton W. Ford

Part II. Dis/Trusting Artificial Intelligence
5. Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk and Technological Purism
Jeffrey M. Binder
6. Long Live the New Flesh: AI Compliance and Trust in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
Curtis Runstedler
7. In the Mirror of Artificial Intelligence: Sincerity, Literature and Trust
in Viktor Pelevin’s iPhuck 10
Katerina Pavlidi

Part III. Dis/Trusting the Digital Economy
8. ‘Too paranoid for you?’: Suspicion, Trust and (Post/Meta?)Modern Money in
Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
Rob Hawkes
9. Trusting the Blockchain, Trusting the Novel in Jennifer Egan’s
The Candy House
Adam Kelly
10. Trusting in the Trustless: The Implications of NFT Poetry
Bryn Tales

Part IV. Dis/Trusting the Digital Image
11. Dis/Trusting Digital Photography in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing
Helen Penet
12. Horrors of Digital Communication in Found-Footage Supernatural Films
Thomas Britt

Index

About the contributors

Adam Kelly

Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin. He is the author of American Fiction in Transition (2013) and New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (2024). He has co-edited special issues of Comparative Literature Studies and Open Library of the Humanities, and his research has appeared in journals including American Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Post45. He is Principal Investigator on the Research Ireland-funded project ‘Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025', leading a team of four scholars.

Katerina Pavlidi

Katerina Pavlidi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin, working on the Research Ireland-funded project ‘Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025.’ She specialises in late- and post-Soviet literature and culture with a focus on Russia. She is the author of the forthcoming book Vladimir Sorokin’s Body Aesthetics: Language, Materiality, Affect. Her research has appeared in Slavic Review and in the edited volume Soviet Materialities (2025). She is co-convener of the Soviet Temporalities Study Group which is supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).