"Something so deeply earned": Sympathy in William Gibson's The Peripheral

Abstract:William Gibson's 2014 novel The Peripheral belongs to a body of worka that make the case for sympathy as an effective and affective social strategy. This article maps out a net of relations that links three key issues in respect to Gibson's novel: the strategy of metonymy, the exploration of sympathy, and the rethinking of realism. Despite the well-rehearsed laments about the bleak future and uncertain fate of the novel, in particular, and of the humanities more broadly, by turning to speculative fiction I hope to celebrate the possibilities that still lie in both the literary form and the scholarly endeavor. The growing turn to enhanced realities as well as speculative and alternative realisms can be critically and productively understood through the mechanism of metonymy and through a mode of sympathy