Volume-XII, Issue-IV, July 2026 |
The Journey, Not the Destination: AI Co-authorship and a New Literary Aesthetic in Contemporary Fiction Miss. Nabanita Roy, Independent Research Scholar, Old Police Line, Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, India |
Received: 13.07.2026 | Accepted: 18.07.2026 | Published Online: 31.07.2026 | Page No: 246-250 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.04W.362 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
AI is no longer merely a medium through which difficult tasks get done within minutes. When both Human and AI collaborate, something new comes into existence — the core meaning of a literary work spreads beyond the text itself and converts into the story of "How" it was made. The paper studies this change with the help of real examples and the already existing Literary Theory. This paper does a close reading of Robin Sloan's novel Sourdough (2017), which actually used AI while writing and composing and he didn't hide it. He basically used AI to generate music for the audiobook version of his novel. To understand what significance it holds for literature, the paper has used ideas from three eminent literary thinkers — Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, and N. Katherine Hayles. While studying these the paper came across something marvellous — AI is actually not eliminating the author. Instead it is bringing the author back or resurrecting him to a new role — not as a creator who creates but as the one who chooses, guides as well as explains. The paper identifies this new form of articulating Literature as "Aesthetic of Transparency" — which means that when an author is co-authoring with an AI, the author must be transparent and clear about how the work came into form. This marks a huge difference. It is a genuinely new arena in 21st century literature — and what it asks of us is reading, judging, and understanding literature from now on. | ||
Keywords: AI co-authorship, literary aesthetics, paratext, aesthetic of transparency, Robin Sloan, digital humanities, postcolonialism, authorship |