IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. IT WILL.: Depicting human experience that oscillates between reality and virtuality in a novel

Description

Since the inception of the Internet, novelists have been creating works that find ways ‘to speak back to and against it’, so as to examine their own conditions of existence within it. The question of how to represent the digital world in language has become only more interesting, and more urgent, as it has become clearer that the Internet is not just a device but an atmosphere, a state of being (Schwartz, 2021). While the Internet is acknowledged in much contemporary fiction, it takes up less space than one might assume. Writers who depict the experience of using or inhabiting the Internet in their novels face many formal challenges as online narrative structures tend to be fragmentary and unruly, continuously mutating and changing.

For my PhD doctorate I took up the challenge of examining how to write a novel that’s ambition is to represent life in the era of the Internet. My PhD thesis comprised an exegesis and a creative component that was in the form of a novel. The writing of the novel, entitled: It's Going To Be Okay. It Will., was informed by academic research into current theories regarding the impact of the Internet revolution on identity-construction and finding belonging with others.

The main dramatic question that the novel engages with is, how do we understand ourselves and locate ourselves in the Internet age? The novel answers this question by experimenting with literary structure through first-person perspective and online social media posts to give fictional expression to today’s virtual-real experience. This article examines how I depicted human experience that oscillates between reality and virtuality through literary form by incorporating many of the ideas and theories within my exegesis, firstly, I will discuss the narrative structure of the novel, secondly, the tone of the novel, and lastly, the characters and their individual story arcs.

Period	2023
Event title	Cumulus Beijing: Narratives of Love
Event type	Conference
Location	Beijing, ChinaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National