The Ethics of Digitally Mediated Experience in Contemporary Poetry and Fiction

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I am interested in the ways that recent poetry and fiction engages with the mediation of experience through digital forms (such as social media, instant messaging, news media, and other algorithm-driven content platforms). Critical writing on literary depictions of digital media has tended to approach these depictions as mimetic representations of contemporary cultural experience; such analyses have primarily examined whether literary texts align with sociological hypothesesabout the influence of digital media. I will focus instead on the literary texts themselves, moving beyond considerations of mimetic representation of digital experience to look at the capacity of literature to unsettle or reshape readers' perceptions of the world, given that these perceptions are already undeniably influenced by a profound immersion in a range of digital media. My research will proceed from the following questions: What claims do these texts make about the differences between embodied experience and that which is mediated through digital forms? What distortions orrevelations emerge in the process of such mediation, and what is the effect of these on conceptions of truth or personhood? What modes of participation do these texts draw readers into, and how-if at all-might such positioning of readers differ from that which arises out of reading modernist texts? Finally, how might the answers to these questions challenge or uphold common assumptions about the ethical value of literature?