...James Draney Abstract How do novels come to terms with the social and economic structures engendered by big data and surveillance capitalism? This question weighs heavily on J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015), two novels whose intellectual protagonists...

...-symptomatic” reading. What appears to read as a collection of novels turns out to make a number of fascinating sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociopsychological statements, revealed or clarified by “big” or at least bigger “data.” 1 Eve is conversant with such work but does not engage with it to any...

... on a single novel, is appropriate to an inquiry into how discussions of scale in relation to climate change bear upon literary-critical practice. It might seem intuitive that attributing new scales of agency to the human species or to capitalism would lead literary scholars to scale up, turning to big data...

... historically constructed itself. He focuses on novels by J. M. Coetzee and Tom McCarthy to think through the ways in which fiction grapples with the economic and social forces created by surveillance capitalism and big data, as diagnosed recently by writers such as Shoshanna Zuboff and Antoinette Rouvroy...

... and What it May Portend .” Big Data and Society 1 ( 2014 ): 1 – 21 < https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951714532241 >. Todorov Tzvetan . The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . Trans. Howard Richard . Ithaca : Cornell UP , 1975 . Watt...

... the 2008 financial meltdown and qua the internalization of crisis into an engine of methodological innovation and strife. Indeed, the very latest trends in the academic humanities—big data, thin description, positivist historicism, and the critique of critique—enjoy the veneer of the cool and roll deep...

... engineer and chief scientist for Africa, Uyi Stewart, tells the MIT Technology Review there is “ample data available in Lagos.” “Cell phones, social media, traffic cameras, global positioning systems, banks, and retail stores are all producing terabytes of big data loaded with potential insight about how...

... the presence of “a master discourse that is supposed to shape the texts of a given historical period” (47). Interpretations “in search of an underlying logic to an era” reduce “big swaths of literary history and whole decades . . . to broad thematic narratives or histories of ideas” (51). Michaels’s...

... the course of the realist novel by suggesting the existence of nonteleological “plots” for which as yet no narrative logic existed ( Beer ). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the “big data” approach now prevalent in the natural sciences promises to have a similarly disruptive effect. Raw data...

... to a better, vaster, plainer grip on the real: big data, network theory, book history, cognitive-psychological or neurohumanities approaches, surface reading, speculative realism/object orientation. 9 The disciplinary shift in English studies to more forensic, empirical, and data-driven modes...

... and that unites “the inner drama of impulse and inhibition” (194). No wonder any death of the novel would be a big deal, because it entails the death of the literary avatar of modernity and Enlightenment. The corollary of this fear of the death of the novel and its investments in temporality...

... in their administration of populations. Fiction’s collaboration with political science takes shape as a counter discourse. Where social science privileges quantitative data, literature counters with the qual- ity of local knowledge. A good recent example is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 novel Half of a Yellow...

.... Connolly provides such an analysis in her introduction and concluding chapter. But the novel’s ‘‘porosity’’ (1), too, made it a suitable form for engaging the complexities and varieties of everyday life in Ireland, and these complexities and variety are the real culture in Connolly’s history. Big...

... (Cowan and Bromley 216). Building on this terminological dispute, scholars have also asked whether the coercive persuasion practiced by some cults amounts to something we can refer to as brainwashing. Sociologists who sympathize with NRMs point out, for instance, that sociological data about cults...

..., is the most basic unit of data in literary studies. GoGwilt does well to ensure that we do not take it for granted. He argues “as both a prac- tical and theoretical matter of citation, translation, and cultural authority, the individual passage of literature constitutes a contestation over linguistic...

... and toward making characters legible as compilations of information drawn from demographic groups and social categories. In order to depict characters who are nothing more than composites of cultural data taken on the average, novels had to take a quantum leap from the logic of the exception to the logic...

... of the nineteenth century: bayonet, telegram, and cannon have been replaced by data mining, satellite reconnaissance, and long-distance strikes by weaponized drones. This is the technic sensorium suffused by “[e]lectric birdsong,” as McCarthy has it in C (52), “a set of signals . . . repeating, pulsing...

... or the journalist in favor of temporalities that may at first seem motionless. Writing about the quantitative social science of his time, Braudel knew that what was not yet called big data could enable history to “be periodized in as yet unknown ways.” But he also anticipated multiplicity and surprise. “Mental...

... by the sugar industry, then the titles of these portraits seem to work precisely in the opposite direction by mitigating this invisible loss through the assertion of their idiosyncratic and irreproducible personhood: Valentina, the Fastest ; Big James Sweats Buckets ; Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes...

... identifies a “queasy agnosticism” at the novel’s center (91). This is a novel about the place and possible value of agnosticism and “thinking small” (Rorty 92) in the face of the exhaustion of big ideas about how to change the world. It advocates for a more modest idea of literature as description...