Aarthi Vadde: "Attribution and Evasion"

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Aarthi Vadde, Duke University

This talk pairs attribution and evasion to think about how novelists have engaged with the rise of mass-cultural authorship in the surveilled environments of social media.  It returns to the preeminent Web 2.0 institution of authorship, the Creative Commons, to explain why authorial attribution became the dominant form of compensation for born-digital content.  From there, it shows how contemporary novelists, including Jonathan Lethem, Lauren Oyler, and Stewart Home have grappled with authorial attribution as a form of cultural recognition that misapprehends the nature of literary creativity, increases the sway of private property over public discourse, and greases the wheels of an information-based economy. These novelists bring textual strategies of evasion to their work as a way to navigate, in literary form, a platform culture that touts authenticity and verifiability while depending on opaque forms of tracking and data collection.

About the Speaker

Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Global Anglophone literature, and is broadly interested in the relationship of literary history to computational technologies and internet culture. In 2021 she joined the editorial board of the _Norton Anthology of English Literature_ and is co-editing Volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. She is also the co-founder of Novel Dialogue, a podcast about how novels are made - and what to make of them.

Her book in progress, from which her talk for the Novel Theory seminar will be drawn, is called “We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.” In it, she considers how technical and rhetorical shifts in the formulation of the World Wide Web (from network to platform) are shaping contemporary literary culture and popular literacy practices. The book’s archive features print-based writers of fiction alongside social media upstarts, guerilla writer-publishers, fans, data artists, and engineers. Communications platforms are never neutral, and this book will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.

Her first book, Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature. In addition, Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019). She is also the co-editor of an open-access cluster of essays entitled Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism (Post45 Contemporaries) and the Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science.

How To Join

Please add your name and email address to this registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link and passcode to the event. 

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.