This collection aims to examine the relationship between American fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine our world, interact with each other and understand the human being in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are these recent advances changing language and literature? How is fiction transformed by technological progress and what representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In a context where software can generate literary works, can the force of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars here investigate the American fiction of Russel Banks, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.

Why is David Foster Wallace so widely read? Why does his fiction and non-fiction continue to raise enthusiasm among an ever-growing variety of readers of all ages and backgrounds not only in the English-speaking countries but all over the world, while describing all the malcontents, dead ends and solipsistic tendencies of contemporary civilisation? Presences of the Other counteracts the vision of Wallaces postmodern oeuvre as selfishly self-absorbed, narcissistic or confining and attempts to answer the question of its appeal by addressing it as an open work, following Umberto Ecos definition of great texts. Epitomised in the missing questions of Brief Interviews; in the endnotes of Infinite Jest that entice readers into fertile wanderings; or in The Pale King demands for active editing and creative involvement, DFWs paradoxically difficult and impenetrable work opens up and allows for limitless interventions and participations. By becoming a playground for interpretation, his work reveals itself as an exercise in care. Indeterminate and inconclusive, constructed on Derridean difference, DFWs output testifies to the presence of a liberating symbolic Other; by resisting closure, it promotes both a fundamental reworking of the literary tradition and a compassionate vision of the human condition. Prominent scholars explore varieties of otherness in Wallaces open work by engaging with the dialogue his writing establishes with non-literary discourses such as cinema (French Nouvelle Vague), music (rap, in Signifying Rappers), religion (Buddhism) and philosophy (Wittgenstein and Ranciere). Critical approaches to the authors protean identity, taste for masquerade and performance, and capacity for metamorphosis and transformation, foreground traces of an otherness that sets out a salutary spiritual potential for the 21st century.