This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

The short story is the product of print culture but is finding new ways to thrive in the internet era. This can be through print stories going viral online or, more experimentally, born-digital stories reconfiguring relationships between author, text, and reader. This chapter considers two main subcategories of born-digital short fiction. Microfictions are self-contained flash fictions predicated on absolute verbal economy. Commonly found on Twitter, they call on longer print histories of microfictional experimentation and the francophone journalistic tradition of faits-divers. The second subcategory, microserializations, drip-feeds a narrative across multiple tweets, as in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” Here too the subgenre recalls earlier traditions of nineteenth-century periodical serialization and Japanese cellphone novels (keitai shosetsu). Microserializations thus reintroduce the concept of temporality into the consumption of fiction, reviving readerly anticipation and creator–audience interactivity. Digital culture thus provides exciting new horizons for the always mobile, innately transmedial short story genre.