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Spider Web, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk explores the shifting functions of the network as a metaphor, model, and as an epistemological framework in US American literature and culture from the 19th century until today. The book critically inquires into the literary, cultural, philosophical, and scientific rhetoric, values, and ideological underpinnings that have given rise to the network concept. Literature and culture play a major role in the ways in which networks have been imagined and how they have evolved as conceptual models. This study regards networks as historically emergent and culturally constructed formations closely tied with the development of knowledge technologies in the process of modernization as well as with an increasingly critical awareness of network technologies and infrastructures. While the rise of the network in scientific, philosophical, political and sociological discourses has received wide attention, this book contributes an important cultural and historical perspective to network theory by demonstrating how US American literature and culture have been key sites for thinking in and about networks in the past two centuries

Recently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to 'read' the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work. More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of 'readability' and the 'crisis of reading', as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Frank Norris's The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called "hyperreading" vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic's formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called "distant reading", or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world.

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction: Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self -- Command and Control: The Quantified Self and Biomedical Transhumanism -- Reconsidering Agency and Choice: The Office, the Wall, and the Tax Code (Herman Melville, "Bartleby" and David Foster Wallace, The Pale King) -- "To Be Reckoned in the Gross": Corporate Storytelling and Quantified Selves in Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End -- Racialized Self-Improvement: Advice in Black and White Self-Help of the Interwar Years -- The Solipsism of the Quantified Self: Working Bodies in David Foster Wallace's Body of Work -- Reading Chick Lit through Numbers: Postfeminist Self-Quantification in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Karyn Bosnak's What's Your Number? -- "I Track my Cycle Religiously": Representations of Fertility Tracking and Childlessness in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs -- Compulsive Self-Tracking: When Quantifying the Body Becomes an Addiction -- The Portable Peoplemeter Initiative: Wearable Sensor Technologies and Embodied Labor -- Instant Nerve-Ana: Biofeedback as Quantified Self Avant la Lettre -- Contributors.

The body has become central to practices of self-tracking. By focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection, office work, and production are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtual work environment. The contributions explore the functions of quantification in conceptualizing the body as a laboring body and examine how quantification contributes to disciplining the body. By doing so, they also inquire how practices of self-tracking, self-monitoring, and self-optimization have evolved historically.

Scheitern ist in Mode: Immer offener wird in den USA über den Konkurs der eigenen Firma und (überwundene) Lebenskrisen gesprochen. Auch in der Wissenschaft hat das Thema Konjunktur. Dieser Band untersucht das individuelle Scheitern interdisziplinär. Was verstehen wir unter einem 'gescheiterten Individuum ', welche sozioökonomischen und technologischen Faktoren tragen dazu bei? Wie wird das Scheitern kulturell verhandelt, und inwiefern kann man es als Widerstand gegen gesellschaftliche Normen umdeuten? Katharina Motyl, Dr. phil., ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Universität Tübingen. Regina Schober, Dr. phil., ist Akademische Rätin an der Universität Mannheim.