Surveillance in Post-Postmodern American Fiction: Dave Eggers’s The Circle, Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

To explore how surveillance is perceived and represented in contemporary literature, the present essay analyses three contemporary novels: whose ethical dimension involves digital technologies and their impact on privacy, human interactions and also literature itself: ​Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010). These post-postmodern novels, as they might be called, tell the opposite rhetoric of the one that emerged with the digital revolution (the rhetoric of a world improved by the Internet and social media). In these narratives, the Internet and social media help creating a dystopian society ruled by global surveillance. The first part of this chapter shows the interrelation of surveillance societies or surveillance systems with post-human characters and dystopian spaces. The second part explores the authors’ engagement with the same digital technologies criticized in their fictional narratives. It will argue for the need to discuss the ontological presence of the author in the digital world: Eggers’s, Franzen’s, and Shteyngart’s novels, with their strong ethical component, offer a good example of why this authorial presence or voice matters. Without aiming at providing a definitive overview of the connection between surveillance and post-postmodernism, this chapter explores how certain rhetorical resources and ethical issues offer a preliminary basis for future investigations on the literature/digital age nexus.