Disruptive technology: Social media from Modiano to Zola and Proust

In this article, Patrick Modiano's 2014 Nobel Prize acceptance speech serves as a springboard to consider the lieu commun that "disruptive technology" is killing both literature and the contemporary press. Modiano's depiction of himself as part of an "intermediate generation," trapped between the intense focus of great nineteenth-century novelists and the many distractions of contemporary writers, cleverly invoked millennial anxieties related to new technology in order to establish his own place within literary history.