. Reading the Database

Abstract

This chapter traces a constellation of literary efforts to represent cognition with and through media. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the central node in this network, the inspiration for a variety of digital modernist works that adapt stream of consciousness. Diverse digital works include a Twitter-based performance of “Wandering Rocks” (by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy), a generative, database-driven performance artwork (Talan Memmott’s My Molly [Departed]), and a complex narrative inspired by a section of “Ithaca” (Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter). Considering these works together and in relation to their modernist source of inspiration shows how stream of consciousness, that central literary technique for representing consciousness in twentieth-century literature that came to the fore through modernism, is decidedly about media. This chapter shows how contemporary literature updates modernist techniques for depicting human consciousness to reflect changes as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital.