Postdigital Recycling in Contemporary Generative Literature: An Invitation for Reflection on Digital Literary Studies

This article advocates the use of the term “postdigital recycling” in order to understand the specificities of how literature is processed today, both for informal contact with literary productions and in a more scientific relationship with them, typical of digital literary studies. It will attempt to glimpse the conceptual models imposed by digital technologies that underlie the current recycling on the rise. This will be achieved through examples of recycling in contemporary Generative Literature. By revealing, through their various aesthetic forms, the functioning of the technology underlying postdigital recycling, its epistemological bases, and its impact on human perception and the organisation of knowledge, these examples invite reflection on the limits and some of the potential that it brings with it, and can thus shed light on academic recycling within digital literary studies.