Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation

This dissertation studies postmodern fiction, electronic literature, digital art, locative media, and everyday social media practices from the 1960s to the present. I argue that these experimental literary works and practices of media production serve as models of critical literacy, albeit imperfect ones, that might lead to increased agency, community-building, and self-sovereignty, especially for historically marginalized communities. The four elements of critical literacy I identify in this project are as follows: that critical literacy is non-instrumental, process-oriented, collaborative, and geospatial. Each chapter highlights one of these attributes at a time, emphasizing its specific value, as well as its potential limitations, within the context of critical literacy. Chapter 2 studies William Gaddis’s J R (1975), a novel that critiques the literalism of Wall Street and the instrumentalization of education while using its experimental form to propose playfulness, humor, and complexity as possibilities for ethical modes of reading and writing. Chapter 3 considers feminist short-form digital fiction like First Draft of the Revolution (2012), Digital: A Love Story (2010), and Quibbling (1993) that depict the process of reading as a complex negotiation between material and social constraints that produces the experience of resonance. Chapter 4 focuses on the values of critical cosmopolitanism and collaboration through a study of governance and representation in works of digital art and literature like “Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities” (2003) and “Flight Paths” (2007). Chapter 5 reads the locative narrative The Silent History (2013) alongside satirical product reviews on Amazon as revealing the value and limitations of geospatial literacies emerging in contemporary literary forms. Lastly, the conclusion points to the practical and pedagogical implications of experimental media composition. Ultimately, the project attests to the ongoing importance of the literary as a site of local knowledge production and cross-cultural resonance in light of technologically-mediated, global flows, where the literary appears in a range of forms besides the print book. Moreover, the project demonstrates the potential for literary theory, from a critical and historically situated perspective, to offer valuable new models for understanding what digital literacy is now and for imagining what it might become