Ai And The Challenge To Literary Studies

What are the consequences of generative AI for everyday literary studies? In this short monograph, Tim Lanzendörfer contends that genAI’s challenge to literary studies is both fundamental and productive: it not only confronts us with our own possible demise as a discipline, it also requires us to reflect on what we do, how we do it, and why. The book is a generative provocation and a thought experiment. It begins by reflecting on the questions raised by the potential to stochastically generate art and literature. It asks after the status of art in the age of genAI, including questions such as the prevalent belief in the need for human agency in the making of art, and issues of quality and originality. And then, it wonders what these discussions mean for literary studies, and most specifically, for literary criticism, for the work of interpretation. What would it mean to work on stochastic genAI art—but more importantly, what would it mean for our work on art to be doable by stochastic genAI? What can we think about when we think about the potential replaceability of human-made literary studies by genAI?

Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Fellow for Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. He is author of Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel (2023) and Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature (2018), and has edited a number of volumes.