Title: Contours of Contemporary Research: Perspectives Across Disciplines
Chief Editors: Dr. S. Durga, Dr. S. Sathyapriya, and Dr. V. A. Jane
ISBN: 978-81-17787-25-0
Chapter: 10
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/880/10
Authors: Dr. J. U. Gayathri, and Dr. C. K. Uma Devi
Abstract
Debates about technology and literature are often framed as a contest: new media are said either to threaten reading and writing or to liberate them. This paper argues that such framings miss the long history in which literature has always been shaped by its technologies, from print to the platform. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of mechanical reproduction, Raymond Williams’s critique of technological determinism, and the posthumanist theory of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, it develops a framework for reading the relationship between literature, technology and society. It then applies that framework to three areas of contemporary change: the platform-based “digital literary sphere” of fan fiction, social-media poetry and online reading communities; recent fiction that imagines artificial minds, including William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun; and the challenge that generative artificial intelligence poses to ideas of authorship, as reflected in critical commentary and in the 2025 American legal decision Thaler v. Perlmutter. The paper concludes that literary and cultural studies are especially well placed to analyse technological change because they attend to form, mediation and the human stakes of new tools, and it proposes several directions for future research.
Keywords: literature and technology, posthumanism, digital literary culture, platform studies, artificial intelligence, authorship