Document Type
Article
Abstract
Piggy-backing on the spatial turn in literary studies, this paper "remaps the present" by making a parallel spatial turn in virtual theory. Surveying and synthesizing the many invaluable contributions to conceptualizing virtuality - from those of Bergson and Deleuze through to those of Daniel Downes and Brian Massumi - a "spatial virtuality" accounts for an increasing focus on digitization without dismissing the previous (and, at times, prescient) preoccupations with temporal virtualities. But I also frame spatial virtuality in terms of N. Katherine Hayles' compelling work in which virtuality is a condition. Within such a framework, many things happen, not the least of which is a sustained meditation on an information-materiality dialectic, wherein two sub-dialectics are housed: that of pattern-randomness (information), and that of presence-absence (materiality). But something else happens, too. Virtuality as a spatial condition comports with the classic tropes of power and literature - namely, circles and stories about circles - and so I use it, along with two novels by Dave Eggers (A Hologram for the King and The Circle), to interrogate how (a reappropriation of) Judith Anderson's intertext, as a condition of potentiality and relationship, might provide the substance of that which is present without being local. In this way, "spatial virtuality" and "a condition of literature" suggest that language and texts are the presence around which information and material bodies congregate, as demonstrated by the self-referential and world-making fictions of Dave Eggers, and as a way forward in the information-materiality-riven discourse surrounding virtuality.
Repository Citation
Frank, Nathan. "Remapping the Present: Dave Eggers's Spatial Virtuality and the Condition of Literature." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–28. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/14