Speculation extends beyond finance into literary narrative form

Evidence

Anderson did not examine the content and style of the first widely read printed novels in detail but focused instead on their mediating role (through narrative form) in vernacularizing social connectivity. Speculative technologies, too, do not belong exclusively to the domain of the digital. Today, the world of narrative fiction and the contemporary novel may not be as central in the mediation of such connectivity, but a distinctly speculative genre of narrative fiction captures powerfully the radical uncertainty of our contemporary moment. Ben Lerner, whose writing is considered emblematic of this style, returns obsessively to the image of “double representation” in all three of his novels, while this is also a central question in the extremely popular biographical fiction of Karl Ove Knausgård. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 405

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Anderson’s print-capitalism thesis from Imagined Communities (which the reader is tracking) to contemporary speculative narrative fiction — novels as speculative technologies of connectivity. — connects to: Materialist literary history argues basic economic structures appear in literature — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 497
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the novel as the original speculative medium — how narrative fiction trains readers in uncertainty just as derivatives markets train traders.