Phenomimes, Skeuomorphs and Remediation

: American Print Literature in the Digital Age

Abstract

Literature is changing. Caught between a centuries-strong print culture and a burgeoning digital age, the very parameters of what we understand a text to be are moving. In this thesis I provide an updated framework of critical terminology for the analysis of formally digressive American print literature in the twenty-first century. Looking to a period of media transition between 1999-2020, I analyse the interseAbrahamsction of technological and literary innovation across textual forms. I draw together three emergent terms within digital critical discourse: the skeuomorph, remediation and metaffect. My thesis contributes a fourth term to complete this critical toolkit: the phenomime.

I begin by considering technologies of memory and storage in relation to memoirs, discussing Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards (2023), and Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (2017). My second chapter looks to networks and feedback loops, discussing David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). In my third chapter I consider ‘Host’ (2005) also by Wallace and ‘The Final Comeback of Axl Rose’ (2006) by John Jeremiah Sullivan, arguing that a specific period of media transition is reflected through the instantiative journey of these essays. My final chapter looks to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), interpreting these novels as laminated systems which reflect the spatiality of screen technologies.

A series of tensions emerge across these texts which are created and explored through phenomimes. Relationships between stability and volatility, connection and disconnection, division and multiplicity as well as surface and depth are enacted across these works. This period of media transition is reflected in both the content and form of the works considered here, and I put forward the phenomime as a mode of uniting these strands of discussion.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Theophilus Savvas (Supervisor) & Natalie Ferris (Supervisor)