The Digital Physics of Reading DeLillo
Licheng Xie · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023
DeLillo predicted the future of narratives in his 2010 PEN America interview, stating that novels will be ‘user-generated’ due to the inevitable negotiation with technology. Intelligent algorithms based on big data indeed meet and change readers’ expectations of what and how to read (personalised news feeds via mobile devices is a typical example); DeLillo even imaginatively plays with this future within his novels by importing hypertexts and social media networks, designing multi-dimensional narrative structures, and performing the interaction between print and digital textuality. Currently, there is relatively little work exploring DeLillo’s potential affinity with electronic literature. This chapter examines why and in what ways DeLillo and his writing are connected to hypertexts and computer-generated imagetexts, exploring the symbiotic ecology of e-lit between digital works and readers, and aligning it with Brian Massumi’s philosophy of the posthuman body as self-networked. It discusses how DeLillo’s language and images resonate with the reader’s body to perform a techno-art of freedom from capitalist power, and considers the internet-structure of DeLillo’s novels, exploring how they encourage the simultaneity of experience both within and outside fictions through the interplay of colours, time and space.