In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
We kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and coproducers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, and she explains how the novel can mark the invisible infrastructures of the internet, defamiliarize the “computational surround” of everyday life, and give us new angles on writing with and against bots. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 9 of Novel Dialogue and to find out what Aarthi’s students say when asked: “What would you never automate even if you could?”
Subscribe to Novel Dialogue on Apple or Spotify to listen and to be notified when new episodes are released.
View a transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned in this Episode
- Jennifer Egan, “Black Box”
- Teju Cole, Small Fates, Tremor
- Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts
- Stewart Home
- Tom McCarthy, Satin Island
- Yxta Maya Murray, Art Is Everything
- Fred Benenson
- Xu Bing, Book from the Ground
- Rachel Cusk, Transit
- Naomi Alderman
- R. F. Kuang, Yellowface
- Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
- Sheila Heti, “According to Alice”