محمدباقر شعبان پور

This paper establishes Twitter literature as a born-digital literary genre shaped by the dialectical nature of cyberspace and its constraints and affordances, including enforced brevity, threading modularity, and algorithmic virality. It addresses the gap in studies on electronic literature and digital humanities, traditionally pivoted on studies of hypertext fiction, while pushing the literary potentials of microblogging to the margin. Synthesizing Hayles’s media-specific analysis, Levine’s genre theory, and other ideas on the dynamics of cyberspace, it argues that the constraints of Twitter do not overshadow creative forms of cultural critique, but, on the contrary, they create a space of tension between democratization and hierarchy. This paper contends that the constraints potentially democratize the production of literature through a highly social space of engagement and participation, yet the algorithmic systems usually preserve the hierarchies and attenuate the democratic potential. Through a genealogical analysis, the literary possibilities behind Twitter literature and its evolution are traced to pre-digital fragments, digital precursors, and key movements on Twitter. Analyses of two examples, including Jennifer Egan's Black Box and Teju Cole’s Small Fates, demonstrate how constraints foster aphoristic density, nonlinear narratives, and participatory meaning-making within the contested space. The paper promotes digital humanities by redefining twenty-first-century literariness and placing cyberspace as a potential zone for genre formation.

Ian McEwan’s Solar has been the subject of many a debate, mostly due to its controversial representation of climate change’s cause and the solution offered for the global disaster. The paper explores the novel’s judgment over climate change’s fountainhead and the protagonist’s vain project to save the earth. The scope of the study encompasses the narrator’s accounts of the characters and events in the story. In the light of David Harvey’s notion of ‘spatial fix,’ the study, through a close reading of the novel, focuses on the context within which the story unfolds in order to elaborate on the transformation of the earth into a globalized monolithic built environment called ‘the planet’ for the sake of efficiency and free flow of capital and commodities. It also argues that the protagonist’s solar energy generation project is a neo-liberal initiative to replace a less lucrative production mode and tackle the system’s critical spell of overaccumulation, rather than global warming.