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Abstract

Indian Journal of Modern Research and Reviews, 2026; 4(7): 109-113

Narrating the Fragmented Self: Modernist Narrative Techniques and Contemporary Digital Identities

Author Name: Muskaan

1. Net Qualified, M.A. in English, Delhi University, Delhi, India

Abstract

<p>This paper argues that the narrative techniques modernist writers devised in the early twentieth century to represent a psychologically fragmented, discontinuous, and internally plural self-anticipate&mdash;formally and philosophically&mdash;the conditions of self-representation that now govern digital culture. Reading canonical modernist experiments (the developing interior monologue of James Joyce, the multi-personal consciousness of Virginia Woolf, and the anxious, self-divided speaker of T. S. Eliot&rsquo;s early verse) alongside contemporary theories of the &ldquo;networked self&rdquo; (Papacharissi, boyd, Marwick and boyd), the analysis identifies a genuine structural convergence: the social-media feed, the multi-platform profile, and the algorithmically curated timeline reproduce, in altered form, the fragmentation, interiority, temporal disorder, and multiplicity that modernism made into an aesthetic program. Yet the paper resists a simple equivalence. Where modernist fragmentation was a controlled authorial strategy that used a disintegrating surface to reach a deeper subjective truth, digital fragmentation is frequently involuntary, commodified, and algorithmically imposed, dispersing the self without the orchestrating consciousness that modernism preserved. The comparison thus illuminates both a continuity in how modernity conceives the subject and a decisive break in who&mdash;or what&mdash;now holds the fragments together</p>

Keywords

Modernism, Digital Identity, Fragmentation, Stream of Consciousness, Networked Self, Social Media, Algorithmic Culture, Remediation, Context Collapse, Polyphony, Temporal Montage, Free Indirect Discourse, Modernist Literature, Posthumanism, Self-Representation, Online Identity, Literary Theory, Media Studies, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot.