@inproceedings{01JDVTCK3K8JX6QCZ2XQ98V3C3,
  abstract     = {{Taking into account the ‘hybridisation of both the digital and the non-digital domains’ (Jordan), this paper broadens the narratological application of the postdigital and test its merits as a reading strategy for the print-based novel. More specifically, I shed a new light on defamiliarising narrative structures and features that are usually correlated with unnatural reading strategies (Alber). The postdigital constitutes the often times estranging blurring of the virtual and the real, just as it comprises the stifling speed at which people have to familiarise themselves with the latest innovations, rendering them banal quickly (Dinnen). Similarly, fictional representations of new media technologies might range from socalled realistic depictions of online life to speculative or flat-out fantastical digital applications. This paper offers a better understanding of how the print novel imagines both “possible” and “impossible” technologies. To investigate how these fictional technologies might enhance our understanding of natural and unnatural narrative, I offer a reading of two recent novels that stage a fictional AI character: the solar-powered ‘Artificial Friend’ Klara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Ada, the algorithmically produced simulacrum of nineteenth-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, in Amalie Smith’s Thread Ripper. Following the example set by Lars Bernaerts and Brian Richardson, I suggest a ‘postdigital reading strategy’ according to the dialects of the mimetic and antimimetic. I suggest that readers might attribute a novel’s unnatural features to a mimetic rendering of the interwoven whole of technological, sociocultural and epistemological shifts that make out the postdigital constellation (Berry and Dieter). In doing so, I contribute to the field of unnatural narratology by investigating the ‘texture’ of fictional representations of our postdigital experiences.}},
  author       = {{Vanden Berghe, Ruben}},
  booktitle    = {{Narrative 2024, Abstracts}},
  keywords     = {{Contemporary novel,Narratology,Contemporary literature,Science fiction,Novel,Postidigital,Internet}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  location     = {{Newcastle, UK}},
  title        = {{What is so unnatural about technology? A postdigital perspective on print novel representations of technology}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}