Being-extremely-online: the modernist telephony in contemporary fiction

Abstract

This article theorizes the use of telephony in contemporary literature, suggesting that the new technologies of communication through smartphones become issues that point to an ontological as well as an affective shift in self-orientation and being-in-the-world. This, in return, calls for a new search in form, one that finds its closest ally in modernist writing. Looking at Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch, I argue that both texts turn to modernist telephony, in particular in the works of Virginia Woolf, to capture the mind in the age of the digital. I begin by drawing on hauntology to show that the double bind of virtual and actual existence turns telephones into ghostly conduits that undo boundaries of here and there, and now and then. At the same time, both texts foreground embodied experience, showing that virtual and actual modes of being are entangled rather than oppositional.