Defense Date

4-10-2026

Graduation Date

Summer 8-7-2026

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

English

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Emad Mirmotahari

Committee Member

Laura Engel

Committee Member

Kathy Glass

Keywords

World Literature, narrative theory, artificial intelligence, the novel

Abstract

In this dissertation, I interrogate the role algorithms, artificial intelligence, and smartphone technology play in contemporary world literature. My analysis begins with the post-truth condition, which speaks to the contemporary era’s embrace of alternative facts, authoritarianism, and conspiratorial thinking. I draw on narrative theory and paradigms of world literature to show how “algorithmic reasoning” has led to a state of paranoid persecution. This reasoning has forged new collectivities across traditional borders. Additionally, I show that these new collectivities and new technologies have produced new narrative points of view: the algorithmic first- and third-person, allowing narratives to retain the intimacy and immediacy of the first- or close third-person while incorporating the broad view and movement of omniscience. Throughout the dissertation, I argue for a new mode of reading and orienting literary criticism that I term “border syntax,” where every site of communication is considered a border crossing—whether in conversation, in print, through memes, etc.; border syntax posits that the exchange is generally governed by a grammar (broad, accepted truths of how the world works) but manifests as syntax (real-time, context-dependent unfurling of language that can, if captured and archived, be analyzed but never fully replicated). Border syntax views the reader as a world and advocates for a more phenomenological mode of reading, an engagement with texts that is less deductive, less theory dependent. This dissertation aims to redirect conversations about world literature to be more readerly focused, more inductive, and more engaged with how global technologies are creating new intertextual connections among seemingly distinct populations.

Language

English

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