Workshop: The Political Novel in Europe and the Challenges of the Digital Era

Workshop, 16–17 January 2025, Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin

In her epistolary novel La Toile (2017), Sandra Lucbert contrasts literary language with digital language as two clashing constraints: the technological, economic and political constraint imposed by platforms designed to capture attention and profit from it; and the constraint of the novel, an often reflexive form rooted in a centuries-old past that pursues a work of symbolisation and distance. “A regime of presentation clashes with a regime of representation”, states the author. This novel, driven by the hope that the hiatus produced will enable us to detach ourselves from our practices, sufficiently so as to envisage the conditions for emancipation, is part of an increasingly rich literature that reflects politically on the vast and multiple issues raised by digital tools.

Our workshop aims to explore the literary and political challenges posed by the digital age to the genre of the novel. In her essay Digital Modernism. Making It New in New Media (2014), Jessica Pressman defines “modernism” as “a strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices in ways that produce new art.” (4) What she calls “Digital Modernism” transposes this logic to current practices and issues: “Digital Modernism […] allows us to reconsider how and why media is (and always has been) a central aspect of experimental literature and the strategy of making it new.” (5) Our workshop aims to link these formal considerations with more directly political issues.

There can be no doubt that the digital age is having a profound impact on all aspects of the literary process. It opens up a new context in which creative processes, reading practices, distribution methods and critical reception are redefined. All the stages of the literary process, but perhaps even more fundamentally all the relationships it involves, are being turned upside down by digital technologies: the literary gesture is being spread across different platforms, the book is being detached from its physical medium, the author may disappear in the face of the possibilities offered by automatic generation (artificial intelligence), and editorial hierarchies and mediations are being questioned. Digital issues and practices affect fundamental notions of literary studies. But how are these changes reflected by the novel itself? How has this new context redefined (or not) relations with the political sphere? What kind of political novel is possible in the digital age?

The workshop will focus on three main topics:

1. How do digital technologies redefine the links between the novel and the political sphere?

• Do they shift the dependence on the political sphere into a dependence on the economic sphere? We know that the vast majority of these technologies belong to private companies: what is at stake in these ownership relationships?
• What do they allow (or not) to resist or bypass censorship, for example?
• How does the digital sphere interact with the physical space of states, institutions and geopolitical zones? And how are these interactions reflected in literary writing in general and in the political novel in particular?

2. To what extent and in what concrete ways is widespread digitisation having an impact on the ways in which literature is created and read? Several points can be addressed:

• Collective creation, encouraged by a writer or solicited by a community of fans, versus the myth of the genius creator. Should we talk about democratisation in this context?
• To what extent is artificial intelligence redefining the notion of the author—and that of the reader?
• What are the linguistic implications of digital technologies for novel writing? Is an algorithmic political novel conceivable?
• Widespread digitisation is redefining the subject matter of literary studies: for example, is a writer’s blog part of his or her work? What relevance does the status of a work published by a publishing house continue to have (or not)?
• How are editorial hierarchies renegotiated by digital publishing practices? Do these renegotiations call into question the established division between centres and peripheries?
• What (new?) communities do these digital technologies enable?

3. How does the political novel of the 20th and 21st centuries represent and question digital issues? Note that novels written at the time of the advent of digital technologies are not the only ones to be considered here: many of the possibilities opened up by the most recent tools had already been foreseen or called for by writers who wanted to break with narrative linearity and the book format (Borges is the best-known example).

• Conspiracy theory, paranoia, propaganda: what place does the political novel give to the linguistic and narrative manipulations that proliferate on social networks and other platforms?
• Does the political novel offer a possible subversion of the disinformation proliferating on social networks?
• How does the political novel work with digital piracy?
• More broadly, what can we learn from political novels about the political challenges posed by digital technologies? To what extent can the political novel help us to think about these issues and to deal with them?

Submission Instructions

This workshop is part of the European Union-sponsored Horizon Europe-project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” and is organised by the ZfL in cooperation with the University of Nicosia.

https://www.zfl-berlin.org/project/the-cartography-of-the-political-novel-in-europe.html

It will take place on January 16th and 17th 2025 at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin as a hybrid event. Since we do not have any funds to pay for travel and accommodation expenses, the facilities at the ZfL will enable online participation in good conditions for those who cannot attend in person.

We seek short input presentations based on pre-circulated papers of no more than 10 minutes length that engage with the proposed topic through theoretical or methodological considerations, analyses of novels, or studies of literary fields. Each presentation will be followed by a response to leave plenty of room for discussion.

Please send abstracts of about 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical note by October 15th 2024 to the following addresses: artemis.r@unic.ac.cy; caponeu@zfl-berlin.org.

Contributors will be informed of the decision in October 2024.

Full papers should be sent before December 10th 2024.

We plan to publish the input presentations as working papers on the CAPONEU website and/or as blog entries at the ZfL blog. Workshop participants will also be invited to submit individual text portraits, i.e. short presentations of one political novel each that illustrate a selected problem of the workshop. In this way, participants will make an important contribution to the Map of the Political Novels in Europe, a digital repository which the CAPONEU Consortium is compiling.