| |
| author |
Keiran Dugan
| | title |
Against Immediacy: Autofiction, AI, and the Decline of Mediation in Contemporary Literature
| | abstract |
In Immediacy: or, The Style of Too-Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh argues that the
contemporary cultural logic, which she terms "immediacy," privileges immediate, unmediated
consumption of art and literature. In literature, this manifests in the form of rejections of fiction
and style, and in the growing influence of genres such as autofiction and technologies such as AI.
Contemporary authors often regard fiction and style as artificial and as distracting from direct
access to realities and experiences. Ironically, in the postmodern era, mediative forms such as
fictionalization and style were seen as imperatives for communicating realities that could not be
accessed through archival sources or direct representation alone. Toni Morrison's Beloved, for
example, fictionalizes the story of the enslaved woman Margaret Garner in order to render the
enslaved woman's lost history visible and to make the traumas of slavery communicable. Tim
O'Brien's The Things They Carried retells and fictionalizes the experiences of the veterans of
Vietnam in order to tell their stories as they were felt rather than as they literally occurred, and in
so doing, to forge connections between them and the civilians in the states. This thesis argues
that such narrative practices provide an alternative to contemporary forms such as autofiction,
which reject fiction and style as inauthentic and misleading. Similarly, the modern era generated
styles in response to overwhelming cultural changes, and both made sense of the modern
moment as well as situated it in the literary tradition. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" exemplifies
such a relationship to style through Eliot's allusive method as a means to replicate the
fragmentation of consciousnesses and societies in his time. When AI-generated writing is placed
in contrast to "The Waste Land," it becomes evident that AI's style is not consciously grounded
in the present nor in the literary tradition, and thus cannot meaningfully interpret the historical
moment from which it emerges. Through examinations of these literary texts alongside theorists
of postmodernism, mediation, and literary history, this thesis explores the potentialities for
human and historical connection inherent in literary forms that embrace mediation, and argues
for a renewed relationship to literary creation and consumption which is consciously grounded in
the past, present, and future.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2026)
|
| advisor |
Jacob Soule
|
| full text | KDugan.pdf |
| |
