We Might Be Giants: Claire Messud's <i>The Woman Upstairs</i> and the Space of the Protagonist in New Media

Abstract New media environments and the phenomenologies they create strain against the generic and formal bounds of the realist novel. This strain can be critically productive, a double-edged site of reflection on the philosophical limits of digital and predigital conventions of representing the self. Constellating Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs against the films of Lena Dunham and the figural sculpture of Ron Mueck highlights these works’ shared use of gigantic human figures as ways of thinking about the dissemination of personal information in twenty-first-century media environments. Rather than merely criticize these new environments for bloating our sense of ourselves, these works more earnestly probe the blind spots that new media can reveal in our older, predigital understandings of selfhood.