‘Prompting’ World Literature: Gerenative AI, Comparative Aesthetics, New Hegemonies, New Peripheries? (ACLA 2025)

The surge of generative AI poses new challenges for conceptualising world literature and comparative aesthetics. While AI is trained using large datasets containing ‘human’-created works, critical discourse seems to (tacitly) posit a new ‘humanist’ universalism by focusing our attention on human versus post- or non-human creativity: Do humans (still) excel in creating complex literary works? Will learning about the art of prompting sensitise us to the specific value of human generated literature? Arguably, such inquiry prevents due attention to concerns raised in previous debates on world literature: What are lessons learnt from the succinct analysis of the relation between form and market, the commitment to decentring the study of world literature, and the critique of universalist discourses? How does generative AI catalyse the very inequities so thoroughly analysed in the past? Against this backdrop, this seminar invites papers which examine the current AI-driven transformation of literary production and reception. For example: (1) Does the use of generative  AI continue (Western) concepts of world literature? How can the comparative study of world literature second the idea of decolonial AI which challenges the legacies of colonialism? (Helgesson 2014; Muldoon and Wu 2023) How does the critique of the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 2000) play out? What is the potential of postcolonial concepts of resistance such as mimicry and writing back? (e.g. Goebel and Schabio) (2) When using AI, writers share their expertise with AI. What are the ethical implications? (3) How do recent comparative, postcolonial, and world-literary perspectives play out, in particular, in understanding the current digital transformation in the face of the “disruptive forces of globalization”? (cf. Damrosch 2020). (4) What are the implications of a world-systems perspective and its critique of neoliberalism? (Deckard and Shapiro, 2019) (5) While teaching the ‘art’ of prompting AI in English literature classrooms, how do we become complicit in promoting hegemonic notions of ‘good’ literature? What is the potential of AI in fostering students’ creativity and sparking new interest in (extensive) reading? 2013). References: Damrosch, D. (2020). Comparing the Literatures./ B. Shang (2022).“World Literature and Artificial Intelligence”. The Routledge Companion to World Literature./ Deckard, S. & S. Shapiro (eds) (2019): World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. / Helgesson, S. (2014). Postcolonialism and World Literature. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 16. / Muldoon, J. “Boxi, A Wu (2023). Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power. 36, 80. / Schabio, S. & W. Goebel, eds. (2013). Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres./ Quijano , A. (2000). ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla 1 ( 3 ): 533-58.