Feeling the disconnect : tension between author’s content and novel’s form in Super Sad True Love Story.

Abstract

In our current era of digital literacy, consumerism, and youth-worship, how have the status of the author and the novel been revised? This paper examines how Gary Shteyngart attempts to negotiate this twenty-first century hegemony in his novel Super Sad True Love Story, written in 2010. In the novel, the use of digital lingo and email narratives to examine twenty-first century concerns such as the decline of America as a superpower suggests that Shteyngart crafts a new literary genre for a new zeitgeist. Yet, the novel locates itself in older, established genres and forms, such as the epistolary novel and science fiction. Hence, Shteyngart as author does not innovate for the twenty-first century; rather, it is social controls such as digital and youth culture which drive the narrative. This paper further explores how literary genres, basic definitions of words, and the role of the author and novel are revised in Super Sad True Love Story by twenty-first century hegemony. Although Shteyngart argues against the changes wrought by digital and youth culture through the content of the novel, its reinvented form undermines his efforts to assert authorial power. As such, Super Sad True Love Story reveals a problematic tension; a disconnect between an author’s content and novel’s form.