Call and Answer: Muriel Spark and Media Culture
“Call and Answer: Muriel Spark and Media Culture” reads the telephone in Muriel Spark’s postwar novels Memento Mori (1959) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as an antagonistic medium that exposes a pervasive anxiety about communication and surveillance. The essay argues that reading Spark’s postwar novels through the lens of contemporary media culture gives us new purchase on her as a writer informed by machine age modernism, whose preoccupation with media demands that we also consider how her particular historical moment breeds a culture of surveillance that we are inextricably tethered to today.