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How do we reconcile the ever-worn discussion of the “waning” of literary reading with the concomitant rise of incessant online reading? This talk will examine the nature of realist fiction in the age of the Internet. The triangulation between the author, reader, and the textual inclusion of the Internet's Open-Source contributors creates surprising, if not exciting, evolutions in the deployment of literary form and narration. In turn, we will see how books' unreliable narrators have become unexpected allies against the unstable information that resides online.
Alexander Catchings is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Irvine English Department. He is at work on a monograph titled “Hashtag Reading: Race in Web 2.0 Literature."