James Draney  

Email Address: james.draney@duke.edu

Recent Publications

1. Draney, J, The Novel's Cybernetic Hypothesis: Coetzee and McCarthy in the Closed World, Novel, vol. 55 no. 3 (November, 2022), pp. 406-426, Duke University Press [doi]  [abs].
2. Draney, J, W.G. Sebald's Paper Universe: Austerlitz and the Poetics of Media Obsolescence, Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 45 no. 3 (June, 2022), pp. 155-172, Indiana University Press .

Highlight:

I am a PhD candidate in English. My research interests include 20th and 21st century Global Anglophone, British, and American literatures; media studies; phenomenology; history of the novel; philosophy and literature; digital humanities; and affect theory. I am also working towards a certificate in College Teaching.

My dissertation, titled Computable Worlds: Narrative Form in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, examines the rise of the data economy from a literary perspective. I show how novelists like J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Tao Lin, Rachel Cusk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ruth Ozeki have internalized surveillance capitalism's operating procedures and channeled these procedures into their fiction. The project has three interconnected aims: 1) it will develop a new lexicon of critical terms for grasping how surveillance and targeted marketing shape cultural production today, 2) offer an account of the changing meanings of secrecy, privacy, and intimacy in the computational age, and 3) show how new modes of data analysis have given rise to new literary formations and subjectivities. Ultimately, Computable Worlds argues that surveillance capitalism constitutes a key interpretive horizon for contemporary literature. A portion of this project recently appeared in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction.