Intermedial Comparatism and Posthumanism

Abstract

This article explores the relevance of the figure and identity model of the cyborg for Intermedial Comparatism. An overview of associated problems amenable to analysis is offered, together with a transmedial corpus of cultural texts related to science fiction and cyberpunk, selected for their canonical value in each medium under consideration. Comparative Literature has always been a discipline of frontiers, addressing literary phenomena that transcend national literatures and languages, based on the mobility of themes, texts, genres, forms and authors. Subsequently, it has attended to the intersections of the literary with other cultural discourses, especially the visual arts. In the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, already in the so-called post-digital culture, Intermedial Comparatism has been consolidated as a version of Comparative Literature that shifts the centrality of the categories of language and text towards that of medium, considering intermediality, remediation and transmediality as central cultural concepts and practices. In 2024, the first year after the explosion of generative AI in the media system and global postdigital culture, the potential of a myth that becomes a central theoretical category for studying the relationship between culture (literature) and technology is reactivated: the cyborg, a being on the border between the organic and the artificial.

Keywords

• intermediality
• comparative literature
• postdigital
• generative artificial intelligence
• transmediality
• cyberpunk