The tweet and the e-mail: Apocalypse, irony and internet in Lauren Oyler and Sally Rooney

Abstract

From the analysis of two novels released in 2021 by writers investigating the contemporary idea of apocalypse in young culture, this article discusses the different routes traced by Lauren Oyler’s Fake accounts and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful world, where are you. Both have disparate ways of realizing and reacting to the same problem: the progressive destruction of humanity by climate change, late capitalism and political crisis. While Oyler chooses a reinforced irony against the ambiguity between cynicism and earnestness, Rooney privileges the sincerity of affection as a solution to the incapacity of fatalism. In the two novels, the internet has a structural value able to influence the writing form, one by Twitter’s irony, the other by the epistolary nature of e-mail, a dynamic that touches literature itself and its place on a radical contemporaneity.