Possible Space: Information Narratives in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station

Abstract

This thesis discusses the featuring of chance in contemporary literary fictions against the background of a computer age undergirded by continuous calculation and technological mediation. With a social landscape increasingly marked by intensifying degrees of control and security, contemporary novel writers value a degree of interference, and even frustration in human intentional activities. I will present how a degree of contingency and indeterminacy is registered and represented in two Anglophone novels, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), and how chance is made to be experienced by the reader. Instead of watering down informatic influences, these two writers acquire new figures for articulating the ongoing negotiation between narrative and technology through “information structures” of network and database. Through reading these two novels, this study aims to broaden the understanding of both literature and technology and provide a starting point for mapping the contested geography of the contemporary media environment.