New media technologies such as Web 2.0 have had a significant effect on the aesthetics, politics, and reception structures of twenty-first century literary and cultural production. This project explores a number of texts that can be loosely defined as either “social media novels” or “postdigital” literature. These texts either extensively narrate the experiences of characters who use social media technologies, or they enact work that is “postdigital,” which means that it is written, published, read, and circulated exclusively online. Considering the extent to which our experiences of and with literature and literary culture are structured by Web 2.0’s mediating presence, this project shows how writers such as Tom McCarthy, Natasha Stagg, Jarett Kobek, and Megan Boyle all reflexively stake out their proximate relation to new media, a proximity that is facilitated literally and figuratively by digital proxies.

Contemporary literature’s proximal relation to new media and digital culture has also significantly altered how critics understand authorship. This dissertation shows how much of the rhetoric associated with Web 2.0 cashes in strategically on the cultural value of political idealism, and I argue that it most successfully does so by equating the use of digital technology with the creation of content. In that sense, this broad shift in literary culture redefines readers as users and authors as servers or hosts. A historical and media-theoretical examination of this shift in literary culture reassesses the resurgence of realist modes of representation and the popularity of non-fiction forms of writing such as “autofiction,” the memoir, and the personal essay. As authors become servers and hosts, what contemporary writers are serving to their readers/users is the promise of an authentic biographical persona. Tracking these broad literary shifts across historical, theoretical, and political registers, Proximity by Proxy: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Theory in the Age of Social Media seeks to better understand how the logic and politicized rhetoric of connection informs contemporary literary culture’s demand for authentic authorial personae, and it offers a robust account of the conditions by which impersonal technical media have become the preferred medium for the expression of one’s authorial personality.