Postdigital, ästhetisch, kooperativ: Der nächste Text

Book presentation of Der nächste Text. Postdigitale ästhetische Kooperation [The Next Text: Postdigital Aesthetic Cooperation]. Hanna Hamel talks with Philipp Schönthaler

Writing, reading, publishing—all processes of text production depend on collaboration and cooperation. But how do these processes change under the conditions of advancing digitalization? What consequences do these changes have for our understanding of literary texts that are no longer only published by publishers as printed books, but that also take on new formats and reach their readers online? And what challenges come with the possibility to generate texts with the help of language models?

Literary scholar Hanna Hamel reflects on these and related issues in her book Der nächste Text. Postdigitale ästhetische Kooperation [The Next Text. Postdigital Aesthetic Cooperation] (Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2025). In conversation with fellow writer Philipp Schönthaler she will launch her new book.

Hanna Hamel studied philosophy and German philology in Vienna. In 2019, she received her doctorate from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for her thesis on theoretical concepts of nature and climate: Übergängliche Natur. Kant, Herder, Goethe und die Gegenwart des Klimas [Transient Nature. Kant, Herder, Goethe, and the Present of the Climate] (August Verlag, 2021). Until 2024, she was head of the research and transfer project “Neighborhood in Contemporary Berlin Literature” for which she also co-edited the online anthology Nachbarschaften. In 2023, she published Wie postdigital schreiben? Neue Verfahren der Gegenwartsliteratur [How to Write Post-digitally? New Methods in Contemporary Literature] (transcript Verlag, 2023).

Philipp Schönthaler is a German author. In 2012, he received the Clemens Brentano Prize for his literary debut Nach oben ist das Leben offen. In 2019, he was a fellow at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Lately, he focused intensively on the relationship between literature and AI in his essay volumes Die Automatisierung des Schreibens & Gegenprogramme der Literatur [The Automatization of Writing & Counterprograms in Literature] (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2022) and Wie rationale Maschinen romantisch wurden. KI, Kreativität und algorithmische Postrationalität [How Rational Machines Became Romantic. AI, Creativity, and Algorithmic Postrationality] (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2024).