Introduction

Steve Hollyman’s ESC&CTRL (2022) is a novel whose playfulness with textual organisation, challenges to reliability, and experiments with virtual reality and identity transposes the digital landscape of the twenty-first century onto the detective plot in the tradition of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987). The novel consists of two novel manuscripts interspersed with email exchanges between the author’s eponymous fictional persona and a character named Ike A. Mafar. The cross-examination of these two manuscripts, annotated with editorial notes and traces of putative scholarly references, intertwines with the detective narrative in which the protagonist (Hollyman) seeks to solve the mystery of his girlfriend’s murder, while simultaneously uncovering why he has no recollection of events before waking up on the floor of a New York City apartment. The email sections of ESC&CTRL are presented in reverse order, resembling how they would appear in email management software with the most recent replies at the top, which compels the reader to make sense of a narrative that is not organised chronologically. Concurrently, the text self-reflexively signals its concern with the digital world in a footnote: ‘[c]omputers, digital media, and notions of the online realm as a simulacrum are abundant in these pages. Perhaps the author is once again attempting to draw attention to the novel’s status as an artefact’ (57). This concern is further reinforced through the incorporation of a hyperlink to a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/escandctrl) and references to images posted there, which collapse the conceptual boundary between the novel and its representation of digital media. Hollyman’s novel intertwines the tactile and spatial features of print with the immediate and fragmentary nature of digital media. Through its hybrid form, the novel reflects the complexities of narrative organisation in the digital age, capturing the interplay between material and virtual modes of being in the twenty-first century. As it exploits modes of digital communication, foregrounds its exercises in remediation, and challenges both the conventions of the detective genre and the very form of the novel, ESC&CTRL typifies a current desire of contemporary literature to engage with the impact of the digital on everyday life.

A quarter into the twenty-first century, literary writing increasingly seeks to capture what it means to exist in a time when digital media have established themselves as unavoidable and ubiquitous infrastructures—exacerbated, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their long-standing presence, digital technologies and systems saw an intensified reliance during the pandemic for communication, social interaction, and the establishment of a ‘new normal’ of digital living. This heightened intrusion of digitisation, operating at microlevels of everyday practice and macro-levels of social and technological systems, makes technologies and infrastructures that outlast the conditions prompting them more visible and deeply embedded in cultural life. This visibility compels writers and scholars to explore the entangled themes of mediality, immediacy, and relationality in the poetics and politics of the digital.

In this light, this special issue of C21 Literature: Journal of 21^st Century Writings brings together a collection of scholarship that critically and creatively examines the relationship between digital media and the contemporary novel in the twenty-first century. The role of literature as a medium in its own right, as well as its engagement with other media forms, preoccupies contemporary literary studies. The diversity of approaches and texts analysed by our authors resists any attempt to characterise this relationship as linear or uniform. Rather than attempting to offer a historic arc in digital technology and print culture, the essays collected here reveal a manifold set of interpretations of how digital media and the contemporary novel relate to one another. Our theme, ‘novel media / media novel’, therefore describes not only how digital media are represented in these texts but how digital media are staged to perform an experience of meaning-making organised around digitisation.

This thinking—of how this relationship is staged in a dramaturgical sense—is largely derived from our contributors themselves, whose incidental use of a shared terminological repertoire (‘to stage’) prompted us to extend this thinking towards our framing of this introduction. Taking such a dramaturgical critical approach, as previously fashioned by Erving Goffman (1959) and Wolfgang Iser (1993), who respectively share an interest in interrogating how humans (Goffman) and texts (Iser) stage themselves and their interpretational possibilities, allows us and our contributors to formulate our observations while recognising their inherent partiality. For Goffman (1959), individuals employ a ‘front’ composed of different socially variable elements to define a situation which is subsequently experienced by others. He calls the front ‘the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance’ (22). Iser (1993), in The Fictive and the Imaginary, extends this logic to the functions of literature, arguing that the fictive operates as a staging mechanism that mediates between the real and the imaginary, creating cultural imaginaries in which social imaginaries can be tested, reconfigured, and projected onto the real world (1–3). Identity, whether in relation to individuals or what texts are trying to represent, is thus not a fixed essence but an effect of the particular staging from which it emerges. Building on this, the contemporary novel can be understood as staging contemporary life precisely as it is affected and formed by digital infrastructures, dramatizing how these conditions script new ways of self-presentation, interaction, and meaning-making, while showing that the novel as a form can intervene in and reflect on these processes beyond its purely referential capacities. This concern unites the contributions in this special issue, which, in the following sections, demonstrate how the texts stage three key aspects of life in a digital age: communication, remediation, and genre conventions.

Communications.exe

The current stage of the contemporary novel’s engagement with digital media has occasioned a shift away from the novel’s concern with the inner lives of individuals, and the role that literary realism has in representing and staging this transformation. Engagement with epistolary e-mail narratives or the liberal use of references to social media platforms suggest that the novel’s increased concern with digital infrastructures afford or limit the ways we make meaning at the intersection of the world and the digital sphere. In The Digital Condition (2018), Felix Stalder traces the development of an increasingly digital society, noting that the advent of digital communications enabled more people to become producers of information and knowledge, so far so that we should be attentive to how meaning-making has changed in this process (22). While Stalder uses ‘digital communications’ to refer to the entire infrastructure that allows the sharing of vast amounts of information globally, this infrastructure mostly remains invisible to the average user. Yet, digital devices such as computers and smartphones shape the human experience to such a degree that even foundational conditions of communication are reconfigured. Computer-mediated communications (CMC) exemplify this condition by foregrounding how identity, meaning, and social interaction are increasingly modulated through, as Stalder argues, referentiality, communality, and algorithmic mechanisms. The increasing presence of the stagings of CMC in contemporary writing attempts to capture how digital infrastructures shape identity, subjectivity, and relationality. Literary texts not only register the risks of fragmentation between a real self and its digital counterpart; as our authors show in this issue, they also productively play with and reinvent conventionally static concepts of authorship and the reader.

This special issue features Devin Tupper’s work ‘Transmedial Communication Across the Creative-Critical Divide’, a non-conventional book review essay staging a fictionalised email conversation between two scholars, one of which is Tupper himself. The boundaries between the real author and the world of the text are blurred by enacting Tupper’s persona as one of the protagonists in this conversation. Sandwiched in-between the polite phrases of email etiquette, a multi-layered review of Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell’s Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method and Analysis (2021), Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbon’s Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis (2023), and Virginia Pignagnoli’s Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (2023) presents the contributions to the scholarly field which these volumes make. At the same time, reflecting on email correspondence as both a tool for academic exchange and a part of daily academic digital labour, the essay also calls into question the form of the conventional book review and critiques the precarious realities of academic labour in the current day and age. Through its performative use of email as both medium and message, the essay foregrounds how CMC reshapes identity and communication, productively blurring the lines between critique and creation. In doing so, it sets the scene for how the digital condition is staged not only through fiction and the form of the novel but how current research actively partakes in shaping this condition.

Madeleine McQuilling’s contribution turns to speculative fiction to examine how digital media cultures are allegorised in the contemporary novel. Surveying the ‘Tumblr aesthetic’ of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series, the article investigates how references to the digital world of the social media platform Tumblr inform new modes of storytelling, authorship and reader engagement. Tumblr is not a platform that easily lends itself to distilling insights for researchers, as Indira Neill Hoch (2020) suggests. Lacking a formalised structure and teeming with ongoing conversations, emerging themes and the continual release and resurfacing of content, the platform requires a ‘web of connections’ to produce a comprehensive understanding (Hoch 2020, 70). McQuilling’s contribution captures this affordance and traces this web of connections across readerly knowledge, digital platforms, and literary texts. Connecting the experimental and referentially rich works of Muir to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the contribution establishes, in McQuilling’s words, that ‘Muir and Shelley share a preoccupation with alternative, counter-cultural, and significantly counterfactual processes of reading and otherwise consuming media’. Meanwhile, the article also shows how Muir’s series is distinctly shaped by the participatory and networked affordances of a digital media context, and further how the novels themselves enact a digital communicative process which invites readers into a participatory engagement with literary texts.

By recontextualising critical and creative conversations within digital environments, be it end-to-end communication in CMC or the social media ecology of Tumblr, the contributions stage the impact that digital media has on understanding ourselves as authors, readers, and critics.

Immediacy remediated

The novel forms of communication and subjectivity so enabled point to a wider methodological challenge to literary studies. As Richard Grusin (2015, xv) observes, the humanities have long privileged literature or language as the main site of discourse, which is a position increasingly unsettled by ‘the nonhuman turn’—a turn towards more-than-human actors such as machines, algorithms, nonhuman animals and ecological systems, and simultaneously a turn away from humanist categories such as agency, subjectivity, and presence. Traditionally privileging message over media and immateriality over materiality, literature appears less well-equipped for capturing a media environment shaped by nonhuman agents that displace the human as the epistemological centre (Grusin 2015). From this perspective, as Grusin suggests, literary studies may no longer seem best positioned to address the complexities of contemporary conditions of media and mediation.

This ‘new’ media condition, as Anna Kornbluh (2023) argues in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, is not reducible to the merely technological (41). Instead, it marks a more pervasive cultural and aesthetic pattern in which mediation is repressed or aestheticised into the semblance of immediacy. In literary writing, the style of immediacy manifests in the proliferation of genres and styles foregrounding unfiltered presence: autofiction, memoir, abject realism, and first-person narration—formal strategies which, for Kornbluh, operate as compensatory gestures against the vertiginous hypermediation endemic to late capitalism (69). Yet, by substituting hypermediacy with immediacy, such works risk relinquishing their critical vocation, internalising the very logic of late-capitalist mediation they might otherwise disrupt (69). Kornbluh’s diagnosis thus expands the account offered by Jay David Bolter and Grusin (2000) of the ‘double logic’ (5) of digital media: the simultaneous pull toward immediacy—a media apparatus that effaces its own operations—and toward hypermediacy—the conspicuous layering and proliferation of medial forms. Where Bolter and Grusin map this structural dynamic at the level of media systems, Kornbluh foregrounds the political and cultural stakes of its unexamined assimilation into the literary and, by extension, into other realms of cultural production.

The contributions gathered in this special issue resist such dismissals. Refusing to position the novel either as the residual artefact of a waning humanism or as the passive symptom of a wider cultural logic, they recuperate it as a dynamic, self-reflexive site of mediation. As Lisa van Straten in this special issue proposes, it is precisely due to literature’s own hypermediated condition that it remains as analytically pertinent as any other medial form for apprehending the dynamics of (re)mediation. By cross-examining speech recognition technologies as a compositional tool used by Richard Powers to write his novels, including Orfeo (2014), van Straten explores how the double logic of remediation is effectively staged textually. Whereas Powers acknowledges his faith in the capacity of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to produce immediacy and to secure a register of authenticity van Straten’s reading of Orfeo demonstrates how the novel simultaneously exposes its own production as a hypermediated process, revealing the writer as continually negotiating the double logic of remediation. Literature here becomes, in van Straten’s phrasing, an interface through which ‘we reckon with the promise and peril of art no longer made with or accessible to us’. ‘The nonhuman turn’, then, does not foreclose the novel as an exploratory site for contesting the medial condition in which the human is decentred. Rather, operating at a phenomenological level, literature emerges as a middle terrain where human and nonhuman agencies encounter one another—and where that encounter is rendered perceptible, and thus open to critical address.

The double logic of remediation, adopted by contemporary fiction, unsettles any neat opposition between immediacy and mediation, making visible how literary form itself becomes a site where these forces converge and contend. As seen in van Straten’s reading of Orfeo, even strategies that seem to privilege presence and authenticity often disclose themselves instead as deeply mediated, calling attention to the very processes of remediation that structure contemporary cultural production. Where Kornbluh reads present-tense, first-person narration as paradigmatic of the literature of immediacy, Ed Garland’s analysis of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) demonstrates that, when read through the lens of literary audiovisuality, such techniques resist reduction to immediacy. Instead, James orchestrates a collective voice that is at once historical and personal, mediated through a dense layering of oral culture, sonic registers, and political trauma. In doing so, the novel resists the flattening logic Kornbluh critiques. The personal and the historical are not disentangled but co-produced; voice, here, becomes both a media effect and a historical claim. Garland’s reading affirms that literary form—far from retreating into immediacy—can foreground the very conditions of its mediation. Both contributions, emphasising how voice, sound, and sonic registers challenge the condition of immediacy, reveal literary form as a multisensory site where human and nonhuman agencies converge, enriching and complicating the traditionally ocularcentric understanding of literature and media.

Across information and affective genres

One of the shared concerns animating this collection is how novels can relate to—and both creatively and critically engage with—digital media beyond the confines of the representational capacities of narrative. This is an important question in two ways. First, it asks how to probe a digital aesthetics phenomenologically, which entails the materialisation of the often invisible, if not insidiously naturalised, functioning of digital systems. Second, it probes how history and social reality articulate themselves through literature’s encounters with emergent technological forms and objects. In a 2004 essay, John Guillory, reflecting on the relation between writing and media, orients literary scholars’ attention to what he names ‘information genres’—forms of writing such as memos, reports, and bureaucratic templates conceived as empty vessels for the transmission of information, often stripped of aesthetic expressions or epistemic content. While Guillory’s (2004) discussion focuses on the memo form as a privileged site for diagnosing the operation of modern systems of knowledge and power, his analysis is haunted by the more contemporary condition of the information society (128, n55). In today’s digital environment, diagrams, forms, lists, and bullet points not only proliferate but also shape the stylistic and organisational logic of interfaces and infrastructures. To attend to ‘information genres’ is thus to attend to the formal expressions of a digital–informational ecology.

The focus on these non-referential features afforded by formal mediations—what Guillory (2004) calls the ‘innate generic possibilities’ (112) of information genres—finds a point of resonance in Garland’s article on digital playlisting as ‘an organising principle’ in James’s novel. Garland demonstrates that James’s novel not only entwines textual and audiovisual media, but also mobilises the novel as a ‘curatorial form’ capable of developing ‘formal affinities’ with digital playlisting, thereby incorporating and staging digital principles through their formal inscription.

Such formal materialisations do more than reflect or represent the contemporary media environment; they intervene in it, creatively negotiating its epistemic protocols and sensory landscapes. For Guillory, information genres and formats, while politically instrumentalised by bureaucrats and administrators, are themselves ‘empty vessels’ lacking inherent knowledge content. By contrast, Katy Dadacz, drawing on Lauren Berlant, insists on the irreducible social and political charge of genre as a form of organisation. Genres are a convention that ‘organises expectations and habituates emotional life’ (Berlant qtd. by Dadacz). In this reframing, they are not inert containers for information but forms saturated with affective and epistemic implications.

Along this line, as both Dadacz and Garland reveal, information genres possess contractual and conventional architecture, which is made visible by the richness and curatorial capacity of contemporary novels. Dadacz’s reading of the science-fiction novel The Employees (2018) by Olga Ravn—structured as a dossier of internal company documents and interview transcripts between human and humanoid workers—highlights this visibility. With interviewees’ identities withheld from the reader, the text renders indeterminate the boundary between human and machine, mirroring, as Dadacz notes, the logic of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart): itself a digital genre designed to differentiate between bots and humans. In their analysis of The Employee and Samantha Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2020), Dadacz demonstrates how normative genres of gender, race, and humanity intersect with digital informational forms to produce a precarious digital underclass. Dadacz’s reading shows that information genres are not merely procedural but affective, generating what they term a ‘glitch aesthetics’—an aesthetics that exposes discrimination and exploitation not as accidental failures but as built-in features of digital infrastructures. At the same time, this glitch aesthetics harbours a generative potential: it captures affective states of confusion, breakdown, and ambivalence that may serve as sites of transformation.

The overlap between affective genres and informational genres is captured in Tyne Daile Sumner’s coinage of ‘cute surveillance’. According to Sumner, this form of surveillance represents a new development in which ‘the panoptic logic of unilateral observation’ operates through what Sianne Ngai (2012) identifies as the aesthetic category of cuteness. Cuteness—often manifested through qualities such as smallness, softness and weakness, for Ngai, can be understood as an affective genre which is manipulated by consumerism so that our feelings of intimacy, care, and desire can be re-organised into consumption of commodities. Attending also to the political stakes of Schweblin’s novel Little Eyes, Sumner’s reading demonstrates how the novel stages the shared ground of asymmetrical power relations between the observer and the (cute) observed in both cute consumerism and digital surveillance. As the contribution suggests, when cuteness and surveillance work in partnership, the latter becomes participatory and opaque rather than simply unilateral, producing new forms of subjectivity as it reorganises the embodied, the intimate, and the intersubjective.

Attention to form and genre—whether affective or informational—not only illuminates new modalities of seeing, sensing, and knowing which emerge from novel technological objects and infrastructures but also reveals how such perceptual frameworks are concretised within our material reality. Aesthetics, as the double process of making through senses and making sense (Munster 2013; 2025), is critical perception as well as creative intervention—a place where writers, readers and users might deform or retool inherited forms to register alternative affects, counter-logics, or new modes of relationality under (digital) capitalism.

Conclusion

Just as Hollyman’s novel and Tupper’s review stage not only one way of experiencing digital media, by virtue of their experimental narrative forms and their curation of encounters between authors and readers, this special issue gives a stage to the diverse approaches to the relationship between digital media and the contemporary novel. The epistolary form of our opening prepared the scene for our contributions to explore the dialogic relations between digital media and the novel. Reading Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory (2019) by Daniel Punday, and The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (2023), edited by Astrid Ensslin et al, Tímea Mészáros closes this special issue through its reframing of literature’s intermedial entanglements not as constraints but as generative resources for narrative innovation. Mészáro’s argument about the novel’s transmedial potential to reconfigure itself in relation to other forms of media does not act as a closing-off but instead reaffirms the productivity of staying alert to the mediality, immediacy, and relationality occasioned by digital culture, and its emergence in the contemporary novel. To this end, we do not lay claim to having worked out the ‘one true’ relationship between digital media and the contemporary novel; but instead we celebrate the scene that gives rise to a diversity of approaches and ways of meaning-making, acknowledging the individual relationships we foster to digital media in and through the contemporary novel.

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.