TL;DR
The paper proposes that conflict over territory and matter is increasingly also conflict over the informational conditions through which societies learn what is happening to them, and closes by considering, and questioning the structural feasibility of, pedagogical and civic responses oriented toward epistemic resilience.
The twenty-first century has produced ruptures technological, ecological, epistemic that have fundamentally destabilised inherited notions of human identity. Digital proliferation, artificial intelligence, and ecological breakdown are not separate crises; they converge into a single, unsettling question: what exactly constitutes the human now? Against this backdrop, posthumanism has gained considerable theoretical traction as a framework that challenges anthropocentric assumptions and redefines the relationship between humans, technology, and the natural world. As Rosi Braidotti argues, the posthuman condition signals the collapse of the opposition between the human and the non-human. Contemporary fiction is among the most honest registers of this collapse. Novels that center around artificial intelligence, cybernetic embodiment, surveillance capitalism, ecological catastrophe, and fractured selfhood do not merely describe cultural anxiety; they generate it, work through it, give it shape. This paper examines the representation of posthumanism and cultural anxiety in twenty-first-century fiction. It focuses on how selected literary texts encode collective fears about technological dependency, the erosion of individuality, ethical incoherence, and environmental fragility. Drawing on the theoretical positions of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe, the study analyses three primary texts Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake, and The Circle. The paper argues that posthuman fiction constitutes a sustained critique of technological modernity. More than that, it maps the existential disorientation of living in a world that is becoming increasingly digital and ecologically precarious. The cross-disciplinary relevance of posthumanist frameworks to literary and cultural studies is also addressed, along with emerging directions for further inquiry.
This paper reconstructs the internal grammar of a corpus of 252 English-language critical texts, indicating that the deeper the challenge to the imaginary's conditions, the less it registers within the vocabulary the imaginary itself recognizes as valid.
The emergence of historical channels mediated by artificial intelligence (AI) on social media platforms constitutes an emerging communicative phenomenon that the academic literature in visual communication has not yet addressed in a systematic way. Chloe VS History, a YouTube and TikTok channel, offers a paradigmatic case of this new digital narrative. Based on three consolidated theoretical frameworks: the grammar of visual design by Kress and van Leeuwen, the gatekeeping theory by Shoemaker and Vos, and the concept of epistemic injustice by Fricker, the convergence construct of visual hyperrealism is proposed to name the simultaneous intersection of three conditions: the production of images of technical fidelity indistinguishable from a real record, a distribution environment without institutional verification mechanisms, and a good part of audiences without critical tools to evaluate that content. It is proposed that this convergence could generate a form of new epistemic risk that none of the three frameworks, in isolation, manages to fully capture, and that would help explain how a historical inaccuracy could be perceived as true without encountering any institutional or cognitive barrier. The central problem is not the use of AI in itself, nor the story as content, nor entertainment as a format, but its specific articulation in an ecosystem where visual credibility operates independently of factual fidelity. Ethical implications are derived for the individual production of historical content with AI and for the role of distribution platforms, and the analytical limits of the case are discussed in order to open an empirical research agenda in this emerging field.
Within EU governing body texts, the same discursive patterns that map agency and erase the middle ground of debate in AI are found, helping to marginalise alternative perspectives from other stakeholders and prevent nuanced understandings of potential harms.
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