Networked subjects: Technologies of interiority in Henry James, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon

This dissertation examines correlations between paradigm shifts in mass media technologies and contemporaneous changes in the aesthetics of interiority in the novels of Henry James, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon. Each author writes on the cusp of major American canonical literary periods---James between Victorianism and Modernism, Ellison between Modernism and post-modernism, and Pynchon straddles early and high post-modernism---and each envisions a technological imaginary that rethinks the mechanics of interiority and the limits of the novel. From the start of the twentieth-century, advances in technology hybridize with literary production to create dramatic changes in both narrative form and aesthetic content, and this study shows how transitions between canonical periods of American literature are often synchronized with the introduction of new networked mass media and communication technologies.