Digital Culture and Human Relationships: A Comparative Literary Study of Intimacy, Technology, and Posthuman Connection in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines how twenty-first-century Anglophone and Latin American fiction represents the transformation of human relationships under the conditions of digital culture. While scholarship on posthumanism, surveillance capitalism, and networked sociality has expanded considerably since 2018, most existing studies isolate a single novel, a single theorist, or a single technological phenomenon, leaving underexamined the cumulative literary grammar through which contemporary fiction narrates intimacy's mediation by screens, algorithms, and artificial companions. This study addresses that gap by reading five major novels --- Dave Eggers's The Circle, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Sally Rooney's Normal People, Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story --- through an integrated interdisciplinary framework combining Marshall McLuhan's media ecology, Manuel Castells's network society, Sherry Turkle's psychology of connectivity, Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation, Donna Haraway's and N. Katherine Hayles's posthumanist accounts of embodiment, Michel Foucault's analytics of surveillance, and Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity. Employing comparative close reading as its methodology, the paper argues that contemporary fiction does not simply depict technology as an external threat to authentic relationships but stages intimacy itself as always already technologically constituted, even as it registers a persistent longing for forms of recognition that algorithmic mediation structurally forecloses. The analysis proceeds through fifteen thematic lenses --- from digital identity and algorithmic intimacy to posthuman relationality and the ethics of technological resistance --- demonstrating that these novels collectively construct a literature of liquid attachment: relationships that are simultaneously more visible and more precarious, more connected and more lonely. The paper's original contribution lies in synthesizing these theoretical traditions into a single comparative framework and in showing that the formal techniques of contemporary fiction --- free indirect discourse inflected by data, epistolary structures rebuilt as message threads, non-human narration --- are themselves symptomatic of, and critical responses to, digital modernity.