Can Good Fiction Deliver What Technology Can't? | Lecture 3

After two lectures diagnosing what technology promises and why those promises fail, Dr. Cassandra Nelson turns to the question that matters most: what can we actually do about it?

The answer, she argues, begins with a word. Literally.

In this concluding lecture, Dr. Nelson offers Don DeLillo's novels — particularly Zero K and Underworld — as case studies in how literary fiction trains the very capacities that technology erodes: attention, perception, vocabulary, and the ability to name the world clearly enough to resist being swept away by it. Through DeLillo's characters, she shows how the simple acts of looking carefully, building a vocabulary, and paying attention to ordinary things — soap, light on water, clean sheets — can serve as genuine acts of resistance against a culture designed to dull the senses and sell transcendence.

This lecture is less a warning and more a prescription: fiction as soul work. Not salvation — Dr. Nelson is clear that belongs to Christ alone — but a way of getting the soul back into fighting shape. She draws on Madeleine L'Engle, Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, and Ephesians 6 to make the case that reading well is, at its deepest level, a form of spiritual preparation.

The Q&A explores whether video games and digital storytelling can carry some of literature's power, and what it actually takes — personally — to put the phone down.