Chapter 9 - Digital Posthumanism (On the Periphery)

Summary

Literature – etymologically, “things made from letters” – is American novelist Robert Coover’s starting point in a 2018 essay that does not forecast so much as inhabit “The End of Literature.” This essay by Coover, like his overall career and lifework, exemplifies a kind of writing that is “all over” – in the double sense of being finished but also dispersing, even as the printed word itself is displaced into and reconfigured within digital media. Indeed, there is today an emerging recognition that computation and universalized digitization might be regarded not as a displacement of writing so much as its continuation and expansion. As Serge Bouchardon and Victor Petit have argued, “the computer is a multi-faceted and complex machine which has at least one very clear consequence: the extension of the domain of writing, in the same way as our possibilities for calculation have been enhanced and multiplied.”