This seminar asks how embodied readers and communities still matter after AI. As the AI giants harvest texts, surveil clicks, and monetize every act of attention, how are literary communities turning toward bodies, voices, gatherings, and material-relational forms of reading together? We are interested in the contradictory ways that writers, readers, and publishers are responding to the datafication, ensloppification, and AI-summary reductivism of the contemporary textual world, whether with further disembodiment or with a new craving for intellectual, relational, and literary corporeality. We use embodiment hunger to name a pervasive social desire legible in the resurgence of book clubs and other physical and virtual gathering spaces for reading and thinking together. We see it, too, in the symbolic contestation over bodies of data (training materials, disemboweled texts, small corpora versus “big data”) and in a redoubled attention to the embodiment of writers and readers themselves.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Embodiment

• Dissensus in literary and theoretical cultures, feminist or otherwise
• Embodied forms of reading (e.g. How do attention, affect, identity, mediation, and voice shape literary culture now?)
• Social and embodied processes of reading and response
• Bibliotherapies, fanfic gift economies, and the (print) crafting resurgence
• The (dis)embodiments of digital literary cultures (BookTok, Goodreads, algorithmic recommendation) as well as physical classrooms, seminars, and book clubs
• Pedagogical responses to AI (reading journals, new forms of community, project learning, etc.)
• Comparative cultures of readerly embodiment (e.g. invisibilized data laborers and readers in and beyond the Global South)
• AI (dis)embodiment and intersectional critique: the automation of social, intellectual, and sexual reproduction in AI therapists, teachers, tutors, maids, sex workers
• Embodied responses to AI (How do we, as gendered, somatic, and social subjects, respond to AI texts and their anathemization?)
• Discourses of post-literacy and cultural contestations over reading

Readers and Reception

• Reader response and digital humanities approaches to contemporary literary communities
• Book history and new mediations of literary culture, alongside compulsory author social media marketing
• Literary and feminist podcasting, audience as community, and the market for “voice”
• Platform economies, training as labor and enclosure, reading and writing as labor, datafication and its discontents
• Genre hungers: How do body horror, SF, fantasy, and intersectional romance respond to the (dis)embodiment of reading and writing?

How does embodiment hunger resist or play into technocapitalist and patriarchal structures of feeling and unfeeling? In this seminar, we work out shared ideas on this question in community, leading to a possible cluster of articles or minigraphs. We invite 200-250-word abstracts along with a 2-sentence biography. Seminar papers will be pre-circulated and discussed.