PRESENTATION!!! Hurrah!
TECHNOLOGY AND DISTANCE IN JENNIFER EGAN’S THE KEEP AND JERZY KOSINSKI’S BEING THERE
Relevant Theory/Criticism:
Jean Baudrillard:Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible
Mark William Roche: We increasingly fear empty time, time without the television running, without a Walkman on our heads, without a computer game in our hands, because we can no longer know how to make use of it
Roche on Heidegger: Humanity encounters in this age its own products, not its essence, and it responds to this inner emptiness with the creation of newer and newer gadgets
Gregor Goethals, The TV Ritual: In a society that has tended to de-emphasize the sacramental, it may be that ritualization of even the most nonsacred events is a response to a ritually deprived population
TV, more than any other medium gives models to the American people–models for life as it is, or should, or can be lived
Sven Birkerts: It is not television that is conforming to modern life so much as it is modern life that is taking on the hues of the medium
Textual References:
The Keep: description of Danny as “a lot of black clothes covering up a lot of white skin Danny made even whiter with Johnson’s baby powder. Straight dyed-black hair an inch past his neck…He looked clearest to himself standin buck naked in front of the mirror so he could see the dregs of the many IDs he had tried on”
Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny…Being in one place and thinking about another place could make him feel at home
Being There: “By changing the channel, he could change himself”
Self-identification with TV: “the figure on the TV screen looked like his own reflection in a mirror”
Chance’s relation to sex: “on television he had never seen the unnaturally enlarged hidden parts of men and women, or these freakish embraces”
Conclusion: Technology creates a simulataneous bridging of great distances and creation of interpersonal, physical distance as a result of the dependency on devices such as the television and the cellphone for connections to others. Both Egan and Kosinski’s novels characterize the impact of technology on the identity of the self, with the prevalence of technology acting as a barrier to forming deep relationships between humans even while linking the characters to hundreds, if not millions of other inhabitants of Earth through television and global telecommunications technology.
