The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture by Zara Dinnen (review)

Notwithstanding having been trained in literary studies, many of the field’s most prominent scholars (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alexander R. Galloway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark B. N. Hansen, Lisa Nakamura, Ian Bogost) moved discussion of digital technologies and cultures decisively away from figures familiar to the imagination of literary theory—an affinity that enabled the field initially to thrive in the 1990s, most obviously in George Landow’s theorization of hypertext in relation to Roland Barthes’s notion of text as a “tissue of quotations.” [...]with the rise of smartphones, ubiquitous networks, and social media, digital media could no longer be said to be new. [...]the book addresses these important significations indirectly, for example in its excellent discussions of boredom and distraction.