How have digital media changed the way authors write? How has the internet affected literary texts and the ways they conceive of memory, information, identity, space, and time? This class tests that question by examining authors whose careers span the digital age (roughly from the early 1980s to the current moment). We will explore early and later works by Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus and The Human Stain) and Toni Morrison (Sula, God Help the Child). Then we will look at authors who foreground digital media and devices: Chimimanda Ngoza Adichie (Americanah) and/or Mohsin Hamid (Exit West). Besides giving us an opportunity to compare books by a range of contemporary authors, this experiment will draw attention to such topics as reading habits, fans and audiences, the economics of publishing, and the migrations of narrative across different cultural spaces and media forms.
