Abstract
AbstractI discuss three novels by three contemporary Nordic writers: Lena Andersson, Vigdis Hjorth, and Hanne Ørstavik. All the novels describe experiences of love, waiting, and longing. In all of them mobile phones serve as apparatuses for availability and for capturing and holding attention. I first present the smartphone as an apparatus in a critical theoretical context, stressing how mobile technology restructures the experience of time and space in late modernity. I then discuss how this challenges the literary discourse on love and longing, which to a large extent has been developed in epistolary genres. Finally, I discuss how Andersson, Hjorth, and Ørstavik describe cell phones and smartphones as apparatuses for desubjectivation and subjectivation in a new critical literary situation.
Highlights
The smartphone is arguably the most important of various technological devices restructuring the experience of space and time in late modernity
The smartphone is an example of what Giorgio Agamben calls a dispositif, usually translated into the slightly misleading word apparatus in English
Later in the same essay: I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. (Agamben 2009, 14)
Summary
Love, Longing, and the Smartphone: Lena Andersson, Vigdis Hjorth, and Hanne Ørstavik. The smartphone is arguably the most important of various technological devices restructuring the experience of space and time in late modernity. It regulates rhythms for attention and relaxation, communication, participation, and isolation. It is both an extremely important device for communication across distances and a thing we become emotionally attached to. If we need to switch the sound off, we can keep it close to our bodies and be alerted by its vibrations It has a visual, auditive, and haptic component. It contains our calendar, phone book, and address book, and serves as a platform for all kinds of information, business, and entertainment. In modern cities more and more people can be observed looking down into a screen as they stroll down the street, perhaps they are navigating with Google Maps, or they might be watching a YouTube clip posted on Facebook by a so-called friend
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