Formalism, as it existed between 1914 and 1930, is regarded as the central driving force behind the establishment of literary research as a literary theory sui generis. This process of theorizing literary studies, which had previously been either hermeneutically inspired, positivistically grounded or essayistically liberated from any systematic approach, essentially proceeded via an approach to literature as a technogenic art form. In other words: to think in terms of literary theory means, in the sense of the formalists, to understand literature technically. Shklovsky's “Technique of Literary Mastery” (Technika literaturnogo masterstva, 1930) gets to the heart of this approach.

This relationship between literature and technology has (at least) five sub-aspects in the writings of the formalists, which by no means unite as a consistent theoretical paradigm of the “formal method”. Rather, they mark a spectrum of partially interrelated, but also competing models. In my paper, I would like to outline these dimensions as (1) the conceptualization of the genesis of the literary work as a crafted artifact, (2) the integration of literary production into the production processes of industrial modernity, (3) the relationship of literature to the technical medium of film, (4) the adaptation of the natural and technical sciences for the purposes of literary theory, and (5) the dissection of the literary text into data sets.

Novelists of the early-modern period were often also members of literary salons and practiced the literary games that served as entertainments in the salon assemblies: improvising a sonnet line by line as a group, painting a portrait with words, or compiling a shared story from an imagined sequence of letters. This talk argues that these games were more than just entertainments. They provided a key technology for the developing genre of the novel in the sense that they enabled novelists to model the creative process of compositing a novel. This argument for games as a technology draws on work in extended and embodied cognition (Hutchins 1998; Noë 2017; Cave 2015; Kukkonen 2019), suggesting that literary practices work as technologies of for the human imagination.

I will take Les jeux d’esprit (1701) by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force as my main example to show how novelists developed games systematically to rethink her practice as a writer, and how smaller literary games lead to an exploration of a final “jeu du roman” (game of the novel), where all these elements are assembled. La Force draws on the gamebooks of the Italian Renaissance, where games as a creative technology draw on early-modern protocols of rhetorics (Bolzoni 2012), but she also deploys the gallant, aesthetic dimension of gameplay with its spontaneity and flow (Viala 2021) – thereby bringing together the contrasting aspects of ludus and paidia (Callois 1958) in the same text.

From Dorrit Cohn to Lisa Zunshine, a great deal of work in narratology has engaged with the representation of characters' mental processes. The focus on formal techniques has been complemented, in recent scholarship, by an interest in how the evocation of fictional minds speaks to recent developments in cognitive science, including the embodied and socially situated nature of mind.

However, this body of work has tended to downplay the question of the technological mediation of mental processes. In cognitive science, work under the rubric of the "extended mind" by Andy Clark and others has shown that the mind is scaffolded and enhanced by a wide range of technological practices. Conversely, technology provides a set of metaphors for understanding mental experience (think about the computational metaphors of first-generation cognitive science). This paper explores how algorithmic technologies, particularly on social media platforms, are inspiring new ways of presenting characters' minds in contemporary fiction. Through their well-known tendency to polarize emotional and moral content, social media represent a cognitive infrastructure that shapes users' psychological propensities. The paper explores how contemporary fiction is developing formal resources to capture the impact of these technologies on the level of characters' "mind style," to use Roger Fowler's terminology.

My examples include Jenny Offill's Weather and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, two recent novels by US authors who use typographical and stylistic devices to recreate the forms of thinking that are commonly associated with social media, from meme-like irony to short attention spans. I will argue that these texts function as both an exploration of the psychological impact of computational culture and a critique of the biases it introduces in public discourse.

Historically based primarily on literary models (Booth 1961, Kermode 1967, Pavel 1980), almost all theories of fiction have now become inter- or trans-medial since the rise of intermedia studies (Helbig 1998, Müller 2000, Méchoulan 2003) in the 1990s. None of them can altogether dispense with a reflection on the constraints imposed on fiction by the text as a specific medium, insofar as literature in itself has become a special case, instead of the universal model, of the worldwide use and consumption of fiction, and is increasingly marginalised in this role by the expansion of series via streaming. However, literary theory has always given considerable attention to the constraints and possibilities associated with the specific technologies used by different types of fiction (Schaeffer 1999, Paige 2021), whether in the study of particular literary genres (poetic composition games, commedia dell'arte, mystery novels) or in the study of the different material formats of fictional discourse (oral, written, digital, ludic, interactive, etc.). This paper will focus on the way in which the affordances of these different formats are taken into account by theories of fiction, and the role they play in its definition.