Fiction in the Age of Digital Photography: Fragmented Bodies, Distorted Time and Lost Control in Recent Irish Women’s Novels

Abstract

Almost a century and a half after François Arago presented Daguerre’s invention to the Académie des Sciences, Nancy Armstrong devoted Fiction in the Age of Photography to the impact this invention had on literary realism in the nineteenth century. A little more than half a century after the first digital photograph, Julia Breitbach’s Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000 questioned whether literature written in the digital age has genuinely come to terms with the revolution digital technologies have wrought on the medium of photography. This paper reflects on two recent novels by Irish millennial authors to see if this finding still holds. Referring to some of the fundamental differences between analogue and digital photography – fragmentation, temporality and authoriality – this paper suggests that in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2015) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), digital photography is not only foregrounded thematically, but also has an impact on the writing itself.