Platform Fiction
Feb 6, 2026 — 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
As part of its Guest Lecture Series, the Department of English invites you to its latest lecture.
Platform Fiction
Through brief case studies of some YA and romance novels, this talk explores how digital platforms are shaping the publishing industry—and the nature of narrative itself. Wattpad promises inclusive community in lieu of payment for writing, and rewards writers who are willing to see themselves as care workers responsible for their readers. Audible turns audiobooks into a way of managing one’s moods and maximizing industriousness. TikTok turns the work of marketing books into a fun hobby, and deskills advertising via built-in tools. Amazon self-publishing blurs passion and entrepreneurialism in a competitive environment where pay is tiny and irregular. Platforms have a gravitational pull today, as people are moving away from traditional immersive print-based reading forms and toward ambient online media that is ever present, easily accessed, and cheap. They are conducive to particular narrative forms, which we can understand as platform fiction.
Guest Speaker
Sarah Brouillette
Sarah Brouillette is Professor of English at Carleton University. Her research interests span contemporary literature and culture, cultural and social theory, sociology of culture, creative industries and cultural policy, publishing studies, and Marxism and communism.
Her published works include Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading (Cambridge University Press, 2020), UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford University Press, 2019), Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford University Press, 2014), and Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007).