Profiles and Plotlines

Katherine D. Johnston is an instructor in writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University. She lives in Mount Sinai, New York.

“This magnificent book mobilizes contemporary fiction and poetry to confront the unequal effects of surveillance-based profiling. Literature tracks growing apprehension about the datafication of everyday life, but, as Katherine Johnston shows, literature can also provide insight into the rhetorical and partial nature of all data profiling.”—Torin Monahan, author, Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance“Profiles and Plotlines is a tour de force. Surveillance—corporate, state, or domestic—is one of the key issues of our time. Katherine Johnston deftly guides readers through a wealth of material as she explains how literature encounters/incarnates data. A triumph.”—Toby Miller, author, A COVID Charter, A Better World“Johnston’s sharp analyses of contemporary American literature distinguishes the prevalence of a datafied and quantified culture. Her unique blending of literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies highlights the ways in which the reciprocal relationship between algorithms and stories has recreated how we understand character profiling in our information society.”—Joelle Mann, author, Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral