This quarter will be all about you—or rather, why “you” have become the symbol of an electronic democratic culture. While the tools of technology offer us unprecedented ways to socially customize and politically organize, at the same time, some literary critics have called ours the era of the “dissolving self,” when the “you” has become so institutionalized as to inhibit an individual’s room for self-creation. We will be examining the how and why of narrative and non-narrative forms common to singing the self in the digital age, as well as reading theory about the self in a post-rationalist age. We will be reading all or selections from: The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem; Nobody Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July; Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner; Jeff, One Lonely Guy: What Happened When a Down-and-Out Comedian Posted a Flyer in Lower Manhattan by Jeff Ragsdale etal.; and Remote by David Shields. Some of the theory for the course: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield; and works by Anna Everett, Lisa Nakamura, and Clay Shirky.