Jason M. Beckman is a literary and media scholar whose work blends the methods and critical vocabularies of literary studies, media theory, area studies, and human-computer interaction. With a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages in Cultures from Stanford University, Beckman’s research places Japanese literature at the center of global debates on emerging media technologies, seeing experiences of new media as interwoven with literature and narrative.
At Princeton, Beckman is working on a first book project, tentatively titled “Encounterings: Virtual ‘You,’ Artificial ‘I,’ and Where ‘We’ Meet in Media.” The book traces aesthetic and mediated encounters through conceptual pairings of contemporary literary and media forms. Second-person narrative collides with virtual reality in the virtual “you,” which applies insights from embodied cognition and immersive VR to understand the mechanisms at play in second-person fiction, as well as their related implications for experiences of empathy, estrangement, and identification. The artificial “I” examines the global literary phenomenon of autofiction in conversation with identity building in social media, in progression from the social networks surrounding the production of the I-novel in early twentieth-century Japan to instantaneous, international exchanges across networked social media in the twenty-first. Autofiction lays bare the artifice of identity construction across disparate media, linked through the human who configures identities and profiles; novel-reading prefigures digital social media interaction and the algorithmic processing of identity information in the contexts of artificial intelligence and surveillance capitalism. Together, intersubjectivities of “you” and “I” point toward new configurations of literature, and the emergence of a “we” that exists not as an inscribed term of address but outside the boundaries of the text, a definitive characteristic of the evolving, media-crossing literatures of the digital age.
Beckman earned an A.B. in Literary Arts from Brown University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from University College London. His research has been supported by the Japan Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Freeman-Spogli Institute Japan Fund, and the Mellon Foundation. A selection of his scholarly work and translations can be found in Literature, Humanities, and The Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and a chapter on breaking points of the embodiment illusion and empathy is forthcoming in an anthology on postcolonial VR. Beckman is also at work on a series of articles and essays extending his intermedia approach further into the realms of virtual reality, video games, and networked interaction.
