TY - CHAP

T1 - Surveillance narratives

T2 - Overload, desire and representation in contemporary narrative fiction

AU - Veel, Kristin

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2013 by The Peter Lang. All rights reserved.

PY - 2013/7

Y1 - 2013/7

N2 - Traditionally, the idea of surveillance is related to the faculty of sight. From God's all-knowing eye over Bentham's panopticon architecture, to the CCTV cameras in train stations, vision prevails.1 Even when we are dealing with eavesdropping or 'dataveillance', we often speak of surveillance as that which makes visible what was previously invisible. It is thus not surprising that artworks which deal with contemporary surveillance societies often choose visual media for their investigations, thereby using the same technologies (cameras, screens) as the surveillance industry.2 Narrative fiction has, however, been crucial in forming our cultural imagination and conception of the implications of surveillance. Therefore, it is imagery stemming from literary works by authors as dif ferent as Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick that still dominate the contemporary public debate. This chapter will explore how contemporary literature portrays the conditions of life in a surveillance society by looking at three examples of recent narrative fiction, respectively Ulrich Peltzer's Teil der Lösung [Part of the Solution] (2007), Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (2007) and Tim Lott's The Seymour Tapes (2005). These novels point, on the one hand, to the conditions of attention in a world in which the problem is often an overload rather than a lack of information and, on the other hand, to the af fective and emotional implications of surveillance which manifest in a desire to be seen - A notion familiar from the reality TV trend as well as social networking sites such as Facebook. Furthermore, it will be argued that surveillance, apart from featuring as an important theme in these novels, also works its way into narrative structures, where it articulates a ref lection on the representational possibilities and challenges of contemporary narrative fiction. In this way the novels point to the impact of current surveillance technologies on a cultural and aesthetic level, which can be likened to the impact that the experience of the modern metropolis had on the development of montage techniques and shock aesthetics in the early twentieth century.3 What follows thus argues that looking at the ways in which surveillance becomes simultaneously a thematic and a formal feature in contemporary novels can provide an inroad to understanding the ef fect of current surveillance practices on our cultural imagination.

AB - Traditionally, the idea of surveillance is related to the faculty of sight. From God's all-knowing eye over Bentham's panopticon architecture, to the CCTV cameras in train stations, vision prevails.1 Even when we are dealing with eavesdropping or 'dataveillance', we often speak of surveillance as that which makes visible what was previously invisible. It is thus not surprising that artworks which deal with contemporary surveillance societies often choose visual media for their investigations, thereby using the same technologies (cameras, screens) as the surveillance industry.2 Narrative fiction has, however, been crucial in forming our cultural imagination and conception of the implications of surveillance. Therefore, it is imagery stemming from literary works by authors as dif ferent as Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick that still dominate the contemporary public debate. This chapter will explore how contemporary literature portrays the conditions of life in a surveillance society by looking at three examples of recent narrative fiction, respectively Ulrich Peltzer's Teil der Lösung [Part of the Solution] (2007), Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (2007) and Tim Lott's The Seymour Tapes (2005). These novels point, on the one hand, to the conditions of attention in a world in which the problem is often an overload rather than a lack of information and, on the other hand, to the af fective and emotional implications of surveillance which manifest in a desire to be seen - A notion familiar from the reality TV trend as well as social networking sites such as Facebook. Furthermore, it will be argued that surveillance, apart from featuring as an important theme in these novels, also works its way into narrative structures, where it articulates a ref lection on the representational possibilities and challenges of contemporary narrative fiction. In this way the novels point to the impact of current surveillance technologies on a cultural and aesthetic level, which can be likened to the impact that the experience of the modern metropolis had on the development of montage techniques and shock aesthetics in the early twentieth century.3 What follows thus argues that looking at the ways in which surveillance becomes simultaneously a thematic and a formal feature in contemporary novels can provide an inroad to understanding the ef fect of current surveillance practices on our cultural imagination.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84924546603&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Book chapter

AN - SCOPUS:84924546603

SN - 3034308086

SN - 9783034308083

SP - 19

EP - 37

BT - Readings in Twenty-First-Century European Literatures

PB - Peter Lang Publishing Group

ER -