Post-Truth and the Poetics of Attitude: On Media and the Making of Sense

Author

Andrew Thomas Dunn, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Joan Richardson

Committee Members

John Brenkman

Matthew K. Gold

Subject Categories

Digital Humanities | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America | Other Philosophy

Keywords

Attitude, Fiction, organic philosophy, ecological pragmatism, Alfred North Whitehead, dispositions, mindedness

Abstract

At its core, this project compares two ecologies—one made up of digital platforms and electronic media; the other involving works of narrative fiction—in order to understand their contrasting effects on the attitudes, dispositions, and realities of the persons who interact with them. What becomes evident in the course of this juxtaposition is the fact that contemporary digital infrastructures are creating a world that is fundamentally incompatible with the practice of liberal democracy, as evidenced by the post-truth condition. The first part of this project, “Toward an Ecological Pragmatism,” consists of three chapters that systematically develop a new and emphatically ecological form of pragmatism that refuses to abstract a person from the environment—from the niches they inhabit, the media they consume, and the infrastructures that determine the very worldedness of their world. Unlike recent contributions to the fields of trans- and post-humanism, an ecological pragmatism is less interested in decentering the human, whether by deconstructing the essence of this category or imagining the world in its absence, than on more thoroughly embedding the human in a context that not only directly participates in its practical situations, but also indirectly educates its habits and dispositions.

Part 1 develops this problematic by dealing with three different scales of analysis—the individual moment, in which the attitude of a person interprets distinct occasions of experience; the world, whose technological epoch determines how beings appear; and the individual niches, or habitats, formed by the world’s technical infrastructures. Part 2 of this project, “Laboratories of Conjunction,” applies this problematic to the study of narrative fiction, arguing that novels create models of situated sense-making, moments in which thinking and acting come together in a process of simulated willing. More specifically, it considers how these imaginary ecosystems facilitate the development of what Ricoeur calls “practical wisdom” by immersing their readers in the situated sentience of fictional characters. Ultimately, this project argues that the activities of anticipation, reflection, and identification that intelligent action requires can be educated by our sustained immersion in works of narrative fiction; and that, correspondingly, the notion of character is central to the work of narrative composition. What finally emerges from these considerations is a new approach to literary formalism that is grounded in a poetics of attitude, a way of considering how a novel constructs these fictional occasions, and how the reader participates in their actualization.

Recommended Citation

Dunn, Andrew Thomas, "Post-Truth and the Poetics of Attitude: On Media and the Making of Sense" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6289