Social media and the value of literature

Accumulating narrative and digital capital in the case of Johanna Frid’s Nora eller Brinn Oslo Brinn

Abstract

Social media and the value of literature: Accumulating narrative and digital capital in the case of Johanna Frid’s Nora eller Brinn Oslo Brinn

The article calls for a reevaluation of literary value in the digital age, emphasizing the need for an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from literary sociology, social media studies, and narrative theory. It argues that the twenty-first-century story economy, highlighting the personal story of the author as an interpretive key and a moral placeholder in the reception of literary texts, promotes the loss of autonomy of the literary field. By discussing Johanna Frid’s debut novel Nora, eller Brinn Oslo brinn (2018) and its digital paratexts, the study focuses on the entanglements of narrative, digital, and literary capital and investigates how the author, the publisher, journalists and critics draw from the personal, embodied experiences of the actual author in framing the autofictional novel. The study examines how consistent transmedial authorial ethos becomes a key strategy for managing both narrative and digital capital. Literary valuation is currently being reshaped by platform values such as quick recognizability and clear affective stance. Frid’s novel, combining a critique of social media with pronouncedly autobiographical experiences of jealousy and endometriosis, capitalizes on these platform values as the narrative comes across as highly topical, authentic, relatable and embodied. Moreover, a narrative analysis of the novel’s digital paratexts highlights the role of social media affordances such as shareability, replicability, and scalability in the ongoing redefinition of literary value.