‘Totaled City’: The Postdigital Poetics of Ben Lerner’s 10:04

The chapter argues that Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is a response to the new ontological condition of metamodernism. Not only is 10:04 deliberately playful in its mash-up of fiction and autobiography; it also encapsulates extreme levels of anxiety concerning the way twenty-first-century cityspace and technology are now indelibly intertwined. The chapter argues that 10:04 is a kind of metamodernist thought-experiment, an attempt to formulate new ways by which prose writing can address the contemporary need for meaningful connection and affect. In 10:04, Lerner argues for new forms of creative hybridity, new assemblages of digital and non-digital entanglement, what I term postdigitality, as a means by which human dignity in a post-crash, post-covid city can be reclaimed.