Abstract
In her stories “Pure Language” (2010) and “Black Box” (2012), Jennifer Egan evinces concern with the complex relationship(s) between technology, morality and narrative in a post-9/11 Western world. In “Pure Language” we see the digital handset symptomatizing, facilitating and challenging a generation’s collective eschewal of individual moral responsibility; in ‘Black Box’, the figure of the cyborg embodies, performs and critiques the role of the ‘hero’ in the context of a U.S. nationalism characterized by the escalation of mass political factionalism. In this paper, I argue that Egan utilizes both these motifs and the character of Lulu (featured in both stories), as a way of working through how we might exist as moral agents in a world that is increasingly both politically polarized and technologically hybridized.