Description

In view of current LLM capacities for producing texts, this book offers a reconsideration of fundamental concepts of Literature and, more broadly, the Humanities: especially, of 'textuality, ' 'literariness, ' and 'authorship.' The focus is on original ordinary-language text production by LLMs in response to prompts. For the concept of 'textuality, ' a distinction is made between the conventionally received idea and the technological idea of 'text, ' principally in terms of the surfaces they appear upon. These surfaces are increasingly complicated through various phases of digital computing, including integration of AI. 'Literariness' is conceptualized in terms of set-theoretical and boundary approaches, relevant annotated data collection, interlingual machine translation, and notions of value. 'Authorship' is reconceived with reference to prompters and mega-collective input, and implicated authorship construction. Finally, literary reading is explored for a dataset of LLM-produced true stories on Gaza in mid-2025.