Clickbait modernism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over recent years terms such as autofiction, postcritique and postfiction have been repurposed to designate a moment in the history of the novel, and in culture more broadly, to do with the distribution of narrative authority. These terms have also helped articulate a contemporary double bind whereby impatience with the knowingness of third-person narration meets an equal and opposite impatience with ideology critique, whose unmasking of textual or authorial ideology is itself viewed as excessively knowing. This article reconnects such a discursive predicament to the enduring problem of modernism’s relation to realism. Through a consideration of public acts of reading in James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ (pub.1914), Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018) and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021), it considers the place of realism in relation to both the current impact of the internet and the historical memory of literary modernism. It argues that if we want to think about modernism’s continued relevance to contemporary cultural forms we should consider how the devices of realism imperilled at the end of the nineteenth century remain differently imperilled in today’s online world.