English Honors Papers

Document Type

Honors Paper

Advisor

Jeff Strabone

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

This thesis explores how twenty-first-century novels grapple with the possibility of transcendence, communication, meaning, feeling, and emotional authenticity in our increasingly digital world. In my grouping of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Tao Lin’s Taipei, and Megan Boyle’s LIVEBLOG, I identify a shared urge towards accessing feelings and sincerity in an age of irony and skepticism through a variety of different formal strategies. I propose the concept of “internet realism” to describe Lin’s and Boyle’s attempts to capture how digital mediation affects communication, meaning, and sincerity. In these works, I highlight how these two writers play with narrative, time, and conceptions of self. I then move to Cooper’s The Sluts and explore how the writer adapts transgressive fiction to the digital age. Despite the artifice and lack of truth in The Sluts, I argue that Cooper suggests online spaces—specifically queer spaces—can serve as sites for genuine community to be found, and transcendence can be reached via digital transgression. Finally, I turn to Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and study how, despite the lack of the digital—in both form and concept—the novel echoes the absence of sincerity and feeling present in the other novels of study. Lerner posits “the experience of experience” as a means of transcending irony and detachment to reach a new kind of sincerity, appropriate for the twenty-first century. Across these texts, I argue that while transcendence is often not reached, the desire for connection persists. Even in their failures, these novels offer insight into how literature can continue to function as a clarifying tool in an era of irony, detachment, and loss of meaning.

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.