Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 and the commercialization of the internet, numerous scholars and cultural critics have interrogated the cultural and economic role of attention, as both a psychobiological ability and a psychosocial good. In particular, commentators from many disciplines posit contested theories of an attention economy, a socioeconomic regime in which, since information and communications technologies make information abundant, the attention needed to acquire information becomes the world's most scarce economic resource. This dissertation argues that a parallel body of postmodernist narratives has emerged from the same conditions, in which technologies of attention enmesh individuals in illegible systems of production, consumption, surveillance, and thought management. Intensified strategies for focusing individual and collective attention are essential components of these narratives, and thus attention, as a means and an end, plays a central role in dramatic tensions between power and resistance. At a time of increased concern for what happens to the long narrative in the age of the text and tweet, my analyses of the film The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), novels Glamorama (Bret Easton Ellis, 1998) and Dead Stars (Bruce Wagner, 2012), and graphic novel series Transmetropolitan (Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, 1998-2003), explore both continuities and disjunctions in how different media represent this narrative, since diverse institutional codes dictate conditions of production and reception. Despite the different physiological, technological, temporal, and spatial demands these texts place upon their readers' attention, in the main they share an emblematic suspicion of attention's relationship to the governing institutions of American life, which ask subjects to attend to their bodies, minds, schedules and life objectives according to a digitized ideology of perpetual labor, consumerism, and efficiency. This dissertation also intervenes in debates about the value of close textual analysis, arguing that paying attention to narrative forms and themes forces readers to pay attention to the act of paying attention, increasingly important at a time when large institutions find new ways to monetize attention as a form of unpaid labor.

Since the rise of individualism in the seventeenth century there has been increasing pressure on individuals to define themselves in the public eye. This has led to the recent phenomena of identity politics and self-branding. Yet how is one's true identity - if such a thing exists - ever expressed externally? How do individuals deal with the inner and outer aspects of identity? These are some of the issues which impinge upon the ethics of authenticity. This thesis investigates the development of the concept of the authentic self from its inception in the modern period to the postmodern. Through an analysis of the various tropes of literary texts, I shall illustrate how the concept of authenticity has travelled and transformed between cultural and temporal contexts. The body of the thesis contains five central chapters. Chapter 1 represents Paradise Lost (1667) as the end of one world and the beginning of another. The "Satanic" trope introduces the contingency of transgression and displacement in regard to authentic self-definition. With the birth of the modern epoch, I argue that the collapse of the epic totality instigated the liberation of self through the process of individuation, yet the corresponding loss of "place" in the social order evoked existential angst. In the second chapter I argue that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an apposite inclusion in the tradition of St. Augustine's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Through analysis of the "island" trope I assert that, even given the most perfect conditions of solipsism, the individual remains an inherently social being that retains a primordial compulsion for dialogical inscription of the self. In chapter 3, an analysis of the trope of "voice" as a metonym for ideology in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) portrays Kurtz and Marlow as opposing sides of the authenticity struggle against the ideological allure of collective and absolute power. Chapter 4 associates Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) with the anarchic egocentrism and intense individualism of Max Stirner's philosophy as a means of rebelling against the demands of social collectivism. In this chapter I analyse the "dream" trope in terms of Miller's trademark use of surreal metaphor which, I argue, provides a means of escape from the influence of collective identities. Finally, the fifth chapter will discuss the trope of "image terrorism" in reference to Glamorama (1998). This trope addresses the problemata of the globally destabilising influences of celebrity and terrorism, the tyranny of consumerism, and the Debordian Society of the Spectacle. The chapter raises the question of how, indeed if, in a globalized postmodern world with ever reducing horizons of differentiation, travel remains the last viable option in the pursuit of the authentic self.