THE POSTHUMAN NARRATIVE: EMPATHY AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF AI

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary literature reconfigures the human experience in the context of artificial intelligence, digital memory, and posthuman thought. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Rosi Braidotti’s and Francesca Ferrando’s posthumanism, N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of distributed cognition, and Brian Massumi’s affect theory, it explores how emotion and empathy function as forms of embodied intelligence that resist algorithmic abstraction. Through a comparative reading of Georgi Gospodinov’s “The Physics of Sorrow” and ”Time Shelter” and W. G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn”, the study investigates how narrative form itself becomes an instrument of empathy and remembrance. Both authors construct posthuman archives of emotion and loss, where memory functions less as storage than as ethical continuity. While Sebald’s documentary prose transforms photography and documentation into acts of witnessing, Gospodinov’s fragmentary empathy turns human sorrow into a living network of shared consciousness. Situated between nostalgia and algorithm, their works propose literature as a counter-algorithmic mode of thought – an affective interface that resists the mechanization of human feeling. The paper argues that the posthuman narrative does not eliminate the human, but redistributes its cognitive and emotional capacities across new media and temporalities. In the age of AI, storytelling remains one of the last forms through which humanity experiences itself as sensitive, ethical, and interconnected.