Platform Fiction

COMPARATIVE METHODS LECTURE SERIES

Through case studies of some YA and romance novels, this talk explores how digital platforms are shaping the publishing industry — and the nature of narrative itself. Wattpad promises inclusive community in lieu of payment for writing, and rewards writers who are willing to see themselves as care workers responsible for their readers. Audible turns audiobooks into a way of managing one’s moods and maximizing industriousness. TikTok turns the work of marketing books into a fun hobby. Amazon self-publishing blurs passion and entrepreneurialism in a competitive environment where pay is tiny and irregular. Platforms have a gravitational pull today, as people are moving away from immersive print-based reading forms and toward ambient online media that functions on distracted attention — and that is ever present and seemingly cheap. This talk explores the narrative forms and types of authorial labour that have arisen in this context.

About the speaker

Sarah Brouillette is a professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Literature and the Creative Economy (2014), UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019), Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading (a “minigraph,” 2021) and Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, forthcoming fall 2026 from Duke University Press.

This event is organized by the Global Comparative Humanities Working Group, based in the Center for the Humanities and funded by an Arts & Sciences SPEED Grant.