28th July – 1st August, 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Committee will convene for a workshop during the 2025 ICLA Congress at Goyang City / Dongguk University (Seoul). The workshop topic is “Literary Theory and Technology” and it is open for audience participation.

Literary theory has always maintained a complex relationship with the technological aspects of the composition and reception of literary texts. In Poetics, Aristotle dismissed the whole technical side of staging a text, from scenography to actor direction, committing it to the inferior skills of “show organizers”. Of course, this neglect of technique was largely compensated for, from the Renaissance onwards, by the inclusion of various discourses of expertise (in architecture, painting, dance, music, as well as politics, morality, science and economics), which de facto intervened in the abstract theorization of literary forms. In Europe, the Romantic period was the one that saw, with the reproducibility of the work of art, the massive entry of technology into the production and circulation of the literary text. But it was in the 20th century that technology itself became a central object of thought for literary theory, as a main factor in power relations between individuals, communities and states, and therefore as a structuring element of their representation in modern cultural imaginaries – particularly in the colonial and then post-colonial contexts.

How does this theorization of the technological in literature play out, before as well as in the age of digital production of texts, before as well as during the emerging presence of artificial intelligence in their composition and processing? How did the technological change our understanding of literature? And does the meaning of the term itself change, now that the material, concrete dimension of the technical gesture in the making of the work is once again being erased, to make way for a new kind of abstraction, characteristic of the “liquid” environment in which stories, images, words, fictions and memes are circulated and exchanged?

The Research Committee’s three sessions at the Seoul ICLA/AILC Congress 2025 workshop will focus on all the issues raised for a comparative literary theory by the fundamental shifts in thinking about technology. We will be enquiring in particular at the way in which literary theory accounts for the technologies and affordances of literary forms (Karin Kukkonen, Marco Caracciolo, Anne Duprat, Mara Santi), at the poetics of data processing (Sieghild Bogumil-Notz, Rok Bençin) and at the complex relationship between literary techniques and technologies and their theoretization (Stefan Willer, Zaal Andronikashvili, Susanne Strätling).

Full workshop programme is available HERE and abstracts HERE.