Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-first Century Literature (New American Canon)

Johnston, Katherine D.

ISBN 10: 1609388933 / ISBN 13: 9781609388935

Published by University Of Iowa Press, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 401048208

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-first Century Literature (New American Canon)
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609388933
• ISBN 13: 9781609388935
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Katherine D. Johnston is an instructor in writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University. She lives in Mount Sinai, New York.