Yeonwoo Koo is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Duke University, working on the long twentieth-century novel and its relationship to media history and theory.
Her dissertation, Novel Textualities: Narrative Form in the Age of New Media explores how emerging technologies challenge and reshape literary form. Focusing on four prominent media of the 20th century—the phonograph, telegraph, television, and computer—Novel Textualities argues that perceptions of textual forms transformed after sound recording, high-speed communication, electric image distribution increasingly displaced the novel’s former monopoly on knowledge formation. By taking seriously the genre’s namesake—its novelty—this project positions the history and future of the novel as inseparable from the technological environments that shape it.
Beyond this project, she is also interested in post-apocalyptic fiction and critical archive theory, particularly in the Pacific context. Her article on “amnesic archives” in the post-apocalyptic Pacific is forthcoming in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.
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