...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...

..., will not be able to comprehend its significance and affect—not now and not for many years to come. Perhaps not even after the advent of Sonmi's Orison. There are many things that we cannot read, let alone close read, with computers. 1 We cannot use the buzz-phrase “big data” here because this term has...

... 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 Writing in Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever. ” Journal of Modern Literature 33 . 4 ( 2010 ): 41 – 56 . Taylor Frederick Winslow . The Principles of Scientific Management . Norwood : Plimpton , 1911 . Thrift Nigel . “ The ‘Sentient’ City and What it May Portend .” Big Data...

..., 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 as the funded, but must all be grasped as so much soul-searching and epistemic capitulation inevitably consequent upon crisis...

..., 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 city works and how its citizens move around within it,” he reports (qtd. in Munford ). Experiments in using those data for planning...

... logic to an era” reduce “big swaths of literary history and whole decades . . . to broad thematic narratives or histories of ideas” (51). Michaels’s paradigm is “static,” fails to “account for historical transformation” (52), and does not offer “a dynamic notion of discourses” (54). Given...

... ). 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 on a planetary scale makes ideal fodder for statistical modeling but as yet not so much for narrative treatment, because narrative depends not merely...

... across literary and cultural studies, the new methodologies are laying claim 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...

... 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...

..., and these complexities and variety are the real culture in Connolly’s history. Big events such as the Irish Uprising or the Act of Union, which have become convenient markers for historical periods, are indeed remarked upon by novelists and in novels. But large-scale changes ushered in by Union also affected everyday...

... (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...

..., such that there is no ideal perspective on the world that gives visual data a single, inert value. 6 Nicholas Dames has similarly observed that the inner lives of Trollope's characters are inextricable from their places within a population and an economy. Phineas Finn , Dames writes, is “interested...

... and, in that act of transmission, inevitably changed. But today's infrastructures of wartime communication, like our technologies for delivering violence, are no longer those of the nineteenth century: bayonet, telegram, and cannon have been replaced by data mining, satellite reconnaissance, and long-distance...

... 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 frameworks,” just like technological and political structures, he wrote, have their own “life...

... 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 ; Jacynthe Loves Orange Juice ; Little Calist Can't Swim ; and Ten Ten's...

... 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...