Surveillance in Literature

Summary

Surveillance practices globally are more diverse and widespread than ever before, and the field of surveillance studies has responded by expanding its disciplinary reach and scholarly focus. Once the purview of legal studies, sociology, psychology, and criminal justice, surveillance studies as a field over the course of the 21st century has come to engage cultural studies and theories drawn from critical theory to rethink how different societies and cultures experience, process, normalize, or resist surveillance regimes. An exciting and fast-developing subfield in surveillance studies is the study of the relation that obtains between literature and surveillance. Like literature, surveillance is a technology of representation: Both harness socio-technical innovations and cultural changes to reorient how humans perceive both reality and themselves. Reading manifestations of surveillance in literature raises critical awareness of the logics and rhetorics of surveillance, allowing those so inclined to leverage such critical thinking to resist the strictures and imperatives of surveillance. But literature can also reveal readerly complicity in surveillance practices, both in the world of a given text and the real world. Further, it can motivate readers to alter thoughts and behaviors through its visceral and immediate presentation of the origins and consequences of surveilling. Ultimately, by reminding readers that surveillance is interpretive, and that data, too, needs to be presented in some sort of legible narrative form, literature betrays the artificiality of narrative and information, captures complexities and ambiguities that percolate around surveillance, and offers a therapeutic means to acclimate to feelings of ambivalence and discomfort aroused by watching and being watched covertly.