SCHOLARLY RECEPTION OF PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS: MAIN METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES AND VECTORS OF POLEMICS

Abstract

This article presents a meta-analysis of the contemporary scholarly reception of P. Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This (2021), a key text of post-digital literature. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to systematise the numerous interpretations of the work that appeared in Englishlanguage academic discourse between 2023 and 2026. The article aims to outline the main methodological approaches to interpreting the novel and to identify the key vectors of scholarly polemics at their intersections. The research material comprises scholarly publications selected based on their focus on the novel, explicit theoretical framework, and chronological representativeness. The methodology combines meta-analysis and discourse analysis, enabling the identification of four methodological clusters according to which aspect of literature undergoes re-evaluation: novelistic form, subjectivity, ontology of experience and medial materiality. The first cluster analyses the concepts of «clickbait modernism» (B. Sheils), «memesis» (A. Shechtman), and «digital ekphrasis» (J. Straub), demonstrating the transformation of narrative strategies under digital logic. The second cluster encompasses studies of hybrid identity (J. Butt, N. A. Mathankar, R. Malik), where narrative fragmentation serves as a formal correlate of a new configuration of consciousness. The third cluster combines phenomenological (J. R. Worthen) and posthumanist (S. Baelo- Allué, T. D. Sumner) readings that conceptualize subjectivity as embodied yet inseparable from digital flows. The fourth cluster focuses on literature’s medial nature (E. Addis, G. D. Naughton, Y. Pushkarevskaya-Naughton), where the printed book emerges as a material archive of digital culture. The conclusions emphasize the novel’s reception evidences a shift from interpreting a single work to broader questions of literature’s functioning in the post-digital era: the transformation of form, the reconceptualization of subjectivity and the changing medial nature of literature.