Paper Screens tracks the presence of the internet in mainstream and prestige fiction published from 2000 to 2020. Using distant reading methodologies, Joseph R. Worthen constructs a taxonomy of novels directly or indirectly influenced by the internet and provides case studies of emblematic approaches represented by key texts.
Across five chapters, Worthen probes three axes of avoidant, diegetic, and mimetic means through which fiction represents the internet. The first chapter explores Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and the internet death parable-a reactionary parable or morality tale involving the downfall of a millennial stemming from their embrace of the internet. Identifying another of the predominant forms of internet-facing fiction, the next chapter tracks the parity between web-native writing and the rise of autofiction. Subsequent chapters address overlaps with genre fiction by mapping the internet gothic subgenre and how it manifests both online and in the form of the codex, followed by a diagnosis of the post-internet apocalypse novel, which suspends the internet but often fails to imagine an alternative present. The final chapter argues, via an analysis of Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, that the internet has become an extension of the everyday, the state of reality that literary fiction has historically taken as its subject.
With critical rigor and wit, Paper Screens investigates the vanishing microgenres, Luddite diatribes, and stylistic grafts that shaped the slow cultural negotiation between the novel and the challenging frontier of the internet.
