DOUGLAS COUPLAND’S NOVELS IN THE AGE OF THE „ACCELERATED CULTURE“

Abstract

The paper examines the cultural background which Douglas Coupland’s novels try to question and capture. His breakthrough novel Generation X (1991) promoted a label for a new lost generation of those born up to the early 1970’s with an attempt to question
the issues and values of disoriented protagonists unwilling to invest their emotions into the world they did not inherit. This questioning is also present in the subsequent Coupland’s books of fiction and essays: while The Girlfriend in a Coma envisions a
world approaching apocalypse, Microserfs reports of employees at Microsoft, whereas Hey, Nostradamus recreates the Columbine high school shooting withing a geographically and chronologically modified context. Both the characters and the author find shelter in what they take as the uniting power of pop culture and technology, and the paper tries to explain Coupland’s ambivalent vision of the so called “accelerated culture“, inhabited by pop icons ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Curt Cobain, as well as the Silicon Valley programmers.