Surveillance has radically changed in the twenty-first century. Once a binary relation between citizens and the state, it is now a complex global matrix of algorithmic monitoring, live facial recognition, emotion detection technologies, smart home devices, and corporations who own gargantuan quantities of our personal data.

Yet cultural narratives about surveillance continue to invoke outdated metaphors of visuality, such as that of the Panopticon and George Orwell’s all-seeing ‘Big Brother.’ These conceptual frameworks no longer account for the transnational, multidirectional scope of surveillance and its implications for diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.

My project turns to contemporary fiction to discover, document, and analyse new narratives and imaginaries about how surveillance operates today: its social consequences, its surprising advantages, its creative potential, and its technological futures.

Three key questions guide my research:

1. What new narrative formations have emerged in post-2000 fiction to represent the experience and effects of surveillance? (e.g. metaphors, rhetorical devices, stylistic techniques, formal innovations)

2. How does contemporary fiction help us understand the differential impacts of surveillance on different demographics around the globe today?

3. What subject relations (self and other, self and society) and modes of subjectification (self-awareness, self-observation) does the C21st novel develop in response to the conditions of ubiquitous dataveillance?

Literature has always been responsive to questions of what it means to observe and be observed. SurveiLit aims to show how literary texts continue to guide us into the future, by providing a crucial site in which pressing questions about the technological, ethical, social and cultural effects of surveillance are represented and evaluated.