This thesis explores Virtual Reality (VR) technology as a model for interactive, body-led experiential reading. The objective is to make a case for VR as a narrative medium which invites the user to physically interact with immaterial phenomena. I propose that this exceptional phenomenological character of the VR user experience represents the possibility of affectively engaging with the cataclysmic change definitive of the contemporary epoch.
To analyse how VR can be put to literary work, I explore three contemporary post/apocalyptic fictions which imagine post-technological near-future worlds: Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Don DeLillo's The Silence (2020), and Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind (2020). In my readings of all three texts, I identify the unique affinities between VR and the post/apocalyptic genre by showing how each
writer reimagines futurelessness as a productive, ahistorical place from which technology's synonymity with the future can be disrupted and reoriented towards the present.
To translate the properties of VR to literature, I draw on a range of theories and discourses, including metafiction, digital media theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology. By applying this combination of literary, digital, and philosophical theories to the literary novel, I hope to highlight the potential of VR as a medium which adds
interdisciplinary value to traditional literary criticism. Each chapter explores how the texts varyingly evoke the experiential properties of VR by adopting a discursive and reclamatory approach to the apocalyptic tradition and inviting alternate modes of reading.
The result, I hope, is a thesis which makes a persuasive case for VR as an alternative way of approaching traditional literary criticism and an affirmation of the value of reading fiction to understand and affectively respond to contemporary concerns.
