“It’s almost paranoid at this point that we haven’t incorporated [the language of “the portal”] into our work in the way that we’ve incorporated it into our lives” – Patricia Lockwood

With Lockwood’s statement acting as both inspiration and scholarly provocation, “Form and (Dis)Order Redux” begins from the premise that the discipline of “literary studies” in the present has much to gain from a more robust theory of media and mediation. From McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy to the “post-digital” condition of today’s literary production, it is clear that literature–as both medium and professional object of study–has become inextricably linked to ubiquitous networks of information and technology. As such, the aim of this year’s reading group is to better understand the dialectical relation between the medial substrate of our textual apparatuses and the evolving forms of writing and textuality they engender.

Throughout the year we will explore what media theorist Siegfried Zielinski calls practices of “expanded hermeneutics” by asking: what can literary studies learn from media theory, and vice versa? How can paying attention to particular histories, theories, and artifacts of technical media and textual technologies enrich the study of literature? And how can we think beyond current forms of “remainder humanism” (Weatherby 2025) and related impasses in the critical discourse about large language models and AI? 

To help answer these questions, we kindly and curiously invite students and staff from all humanities disciplines to join the group's explorations of the co-constitutive entanglements of language, literature, and media. Taking the interdisciplinary field of literary studies as a starting point, we will discuss key theories of media, information, and technology that inform both literary and media studies in the present (Flusser, Kittler,  Hansen, Hayles, Liu, Janich, Luhmann). We will devote particular attention to matters of writing, textuality, and form in all its permutations (such as forms of writing, literary form, but also forms of media) and plan on discussing 2-3 literary works at various points throughout the year (Jennifer Egan, The Candy House; Helen Dewitt, Your Name Here; Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers). 

POSSIBLE TOPICS/TEXTS:

• origins of the media concept
• digital platforms and literary culture: (Aarthi Vadde, We the Platform, 2026)
• AI, LLMs, and automatically-generated writing: (Aden Evens, The Digital and Its Discontents; Offert and Impett, Vector Media; Rita Raley and Minh Hua, “Optimization is Not All You Need”; Hannes Bajohr, “Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts”; Mercedes Bunz, “On the Calculation of Meaning”)
• media hybrids: (Elika Ortega, Binding Media: Hybrid Print-Digital Literature, 202
• post digital culture and writing: (Berry & Dieter, eds. Postdigital Aesthetics, 2015; Florian Cramer, “What Is Post-Digital?”)
• technofeudalism in education and literary studies: (Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley, “AI and the University as Service”; Matt Seybold, “The American Vandal” project; Colin Milburn and Rita Raley, “Inappropriate AI”)
• techno nostalgia, retro-futurism, and other historical-aesthetic syzygies                                                                                       

SCHEDULE:

1. Session: 15 Oct, 17:00-18:45  (room TBA)
2. Session: 10 Nov, 15:00-17:00 (room TBA)
3. Session: December/January (date and room TBA)

FOR SUGGESTIONS, QUESTIONS & REGISTRATION please contact M.F.Miller@uva.nl and S.Besser@uva.nl.