Big Books in Times of Big Data (Media / Art / Politics)

This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the present. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven recuperates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book―as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power.

Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.