“Some new dimension devoid of hip and bone”: Remediated Bodies and Digital Posthumanism in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

Abstract

In its discussion of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story , this essay shows how posthuman fantasies of a bodiless existence come about through processes of digital remediation similar to those described in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s now classic study of new media. For these critics, Western desires for unfiltered encounters with reality paradoxically result in the proliferation of new media forms that substitute “hypermediacy” for “immediacy.” Likewise, in Shteyngart’s novel, characters’ desires for attenuated or completely erased bodies are realized in the act of multiplying their bodies’ relationships with information technologies. In this respect, the novel enables us to explore the ways that a new posthuman realism shapes human bodies, desires, and politics in the digital age.