The Digital Banal

Zara Dinnen clearly and forcefully articulates the importance of her new concept, the "digital banal," as well as the way it plays out across multiple social and aesthetic practices. Nothing could be more fundamentally important than the everyday, now utterly embedded in the digital. The Digital Banal empowers us not just to see ourselves as we now are but to become active participants in everyday digital life. -- Lori Emerson, University of Colorado, Boulder
This brilliant study reads current novels, films, TV shows, and web texts to illuminate the everydayness of our interactions with and through digital media, astutely defamiliarizing the banality of those interactions. Dinnen shows how contemporary subjectivity is co-created through platforms like Facebook that feel like authentic vehicles of interpersonal connection but emanate from coding and stored data. Posthumanism, feminism, affect studies, resistance, fandom, and a geeky familiarity with what happens under the hood of mediated communication come together here in a wonderfully original and consequential book. -- Robyn Warhol, Ohio State University
The Digital Banal casts a keen critical eye over the contemporary cultural field and helps us to see digital media in all of its non-spectacular banality, both always there and always on, ordinary and inevitable, normal and normative. Through her perceptive textual analyses, Dinnen in effect defamiliarizes the digital banal, and thereby makes possible a recognition of its latent political potential. A must-read for scholars of contemporary literature and media alike. -- Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dinnen displays impressive critical range across a suite of narrative media forms. . . . At a time when so much seems perpetually in crisis, Zara Dinnen shows us how to think about this very problem, by giving us vital tools for reading the complexities of the present and continuing important conversations between disciplines afresh. -- James J. Hodge * Studies in the Novel *
If the digital banal can only be apprehended obliquely, Dinnen's sidelong readings get at something vitally important about contemporary life and contemporary literature. In the unexceptional humdrum of everyday computing, Dinnen finds new ways to speak of digital existence, beyond affective rubrics of awe and alarm, and her book is both compelling and necessary. * Critical Quarterly *
A capacious fusion of literary study, cultural theory, and media studies. . . . [A] valuable contribution to the study of new media and of the literature that engages it. * English Studies *
Through an archive of texts that uncover the modes of digital effacement and banality, Dinnen capably shows depictions of both resistance and representation in the face of that obfuscation. -- Christopher W. Clark * The Journal of American Culture *