Coda

Summary

The Coda traces fashion’s permeation of the novel genre into our contemporary moment, and contends that the novel’s innovative engagement with digital technology and social media over the past decade has roots firmly in the nineteenth century. Historicizing the advent of Twitter-fiction, the Coda proposes that we recognize in contemporary fiction’s experiments with seriality and hypercurrency an upcycling of narrative forms developed in analogous moments of profound change in the nineteenth century. Twitter-fiction explores the relation of parts and wholes, of individuals and collectivities, in an historical age when digital mediation enables new configurations of publicness, when virtual self-expression is the medium less of identity than main character energy, and when the timeframe of the quotidian has become an inadequate measure of the experience of historical change. The Coda argues that contemporary writers who immerse their fiction in the media and sensibilities of the moment may risk radical obsolescence, but that is precisely the point: they aim to conceptualize the temporality and textures of the immediate present.