Mystifying Technologies: Production and Prestige in Contemporary Literary Fiction

“Mystifying Technologies: Production and Prestige in Contemporary Literary Fiction” examines how contemporary literary fiction as a genre coalesces in the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries to lend unique figuration to the material conditions of literary production and consumption in the US. Reading novels symptomatically and sociologically, the dissertation articulates how the formal and thematic fixations of novels published as “literary fiction” emerge in response to conflicting artistic, economic, and cultural demands for literature to achieve both profitability and prestige. Registering the effects of publishing industry conglomeration, technological advancement, and economic precarity in the present historical moment, it focuses on one prominent strand of recent literary fiction which grapples with the tension between aesthetic ideals and market imperatives by representing the processes attendant to capitalist mystification—from technological mediation to alienation and even fictionalization itself—through formal and thematic engagements with magic, mystification, and dematerialization in otherwise strictly realist texts. The first chapter argues for understanding autofiction, a dominant subgenre of literary fiction, as a publishing “gimmick” in Sianne Ngai’s theorization of the term, making a case for how Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018) and Rachel Cusk’s Transit (2016) recast technological processes of production as occult practices to at once reveal and re-veil their own conditions of production. The following chapter then turns to Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020) to demonstrate how the prestige genre of high postmodernism and the popular genre of self-help converge in the twenty-first century to produce an aesthetic of realist irrationalism, which registers the diverse pressures shaping literary fiction published by conglomerate and nonprofit publishers. Ultimately, the final chapter looks back at Jennifer Egan’s second novel, Look at Me (2001), to illuminate how it re-renders the disjointed temporalities of technological mediation and finance as mystified processes of defacement and re-enactment, at the same time re-rendering Egan’s image as an author of prestige literary fiction