Digital Humanities, Social Science and Cultural Preservation
The Ethics of Not Knowing in Contemporary American Fiction
Abstract
Kawsar Ahamed
This article investigates how narrative uncertainty operates as an intentional ethical intervention against the predictive, data-driven demands of contemporary algorithmic society. Within the context of post-digital American culture, digital architectures and platforms increasingly privilege total computational legibility, behavioral optimization, and the elimination of human error. While existing literary scholarship extensively tracks how contemporary fiction thematicizes surveillance, artificial intelligence, and platform capitalism, it frequently overlooks how these technological developments alter literary form and reading ethics. Bridging this divide, this study analyzes Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) and using a qualitative framework of classical reader-response theory, formal narratology, and poststructuralist ethics. This article argues that these novels deploy fragmented structures, shifting internal focalizations, and irresolvable textual gaps (Leerstellen) not as mere postmodern stylistic play, but as a deliberate defense of human interiority. Ultimately, the study contributes a new paradigm to literary studies by demonstrating that the cognitive act of slow, ambiguous reading functions as an active site of political and philosophical sovereignty, reclaiming the right to remain unquantified and unknown [1].