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Information overload in literature

ABSTRACT This essay is the first to historicise and give a comprehensive assessment of literary responses to cognitive overstimulation. A wave of post-war writing responded playfully to informatics in a pre-digital period through an engagement with physics, entropy and post-structuralist theory. In an era dominated by neuroscientific revolutions, fiction written in the digital age addresses the pressing information overload debate with a new seriousness, often stressing concerns about the impact on the human mind. Contemporary fictional writing depicts an increasingly immersive online experience that accelerates information processing by human minds under technostress. New phenomena such Big Data and ‘infobesity’ affect not only writing practice but stretch the mainstream novel form to its representational limits. Mainstream literature is critical of the changing the shape of our lives and minds at the level of content, yet fails to find new forms of storytelling. This essay ends by identifying new writing that unites form and content in innovative ways through storytelling modes that represent the processes we are living through more accurately. We are experiencing a major epistemological shift, and are witnessing the emergence of exciting, new kinds of subjectivity.