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Abstract
This dissertation intervenes both in studies of narrative fiction and science and technology studies (STS) by proposing a new mode of reading technological objects. It develops a design-oriented approach to reading technology in literary texts and practices a literary approach to reading technological objects in themselves. Current scholarship on technology, even within literary studies, is dominated by philosophical and sociological approaches, which tend to treat technological objects as ready-made. I argue that we must instead encounter technologies as designed objects – objects that embed the intentions and worldviews of their makers and users – and that a literary approach provides us with the methods to do that. Literature is a privileged site for reading technology, because it renders technological objects discursive. Description breaks the objects into parts. A gun is not just a gun. It is a trigger, a barrel, a magazine; it contains springs, levers, pistons. Even when such an object is named as a whole, it asks readers to consider a variety of potential actions afforded by its design. Reading for design means examining both the technological object’s own design and the narrative design that embeds it. Technological design in fiction is thus a kind of interiority, something that illuminates the causal developments informing a technology’s actions. But it is also a kind of exteriority, expressing the world that designers and users want. In this way, it offers critical insight into whom technologies and their worlds are made for. Design illuminates the implicit biases in our assessments of technological objects, in that technologies replicate and amplify the relation to dis/ability, race, gender, class of its designers and users.
Conversely, technology is also an important component of literary design. Technological objects occupy a particular narrative position, one that is not subsumed under the category of setting and is not dismissed as merely descriptive detail for the sake of realism. They are sites around which plots develop, worlds are built, and characters interact. The narrative principle that we have come to associate with Chekhov’s precept for plot construction – “If you say in the first chapter that a gun is hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off” – is less about minimizing verbosity in a strict sense than about the importance of developing causal relations between technologies and their actions in fictional worlds. Reciprocally, a gun that goes off in chapter two or three should probably be introduced in chapter one. This causal narrative of technological action fills in the space between makers and users of technological objects, as it makes the objects’ designs legible. What the author and character do with a technology makes the intentions of its designers and users visible. If commodity fetishism explains why we treat objects as ready-made, this dissertation explores how reading design offers a way to uncover the people relations obscured by capitalist modes of production.