A Great Harvest: The Novel After Big Data

My current book project examines the rise of the data economy from a literary perspective. I argue that the large-scale analysis of behavioral data that Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is a determining force on contemporary aesthetics. The project identifies and untangles the signature plots and forms that structure life in surveillance capitalism as they appear in, and are mediated by, literary fiction written since 2000. To do so, I stage an encounter between the novel’s enduring interest in private interiority and new technologies of commercial extraction that track our behavior and tell us what we want. Bringing contemporary fiction by Tao Lin, Tom McCarthy, Rachel Cusk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Natasha Stagg into a unique configuration with managerial handbooks, literary theory, and media theory, A Great Harvest will reveal the surprising affinities between that the vernacular terms of computational life—creeping, profiling, rating, and cringing—and the novel’s ways of seeing.