Jan Alber (Gießen)
January 22, 2026, 4pm
Campus Westend, NG 731
In this lecture, I will look at the ethical ramifications of post-postmodernist fictions of the digital (PPFDs), i.e., multimodal and transmedial novels of the twenty-first century. More specifically, I will investigate the narrative strategies of two PPFDs – namely Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (2012) – as paradigmatic examples of what has previously been called the “self-reflexive ethics” (Alber and Bell 2019: 133) of post-postmodernist fiction.
Jan Alber is Professor of English and American Literature at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen.