Punctum.

By: Danilo Petrassi

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how Luciano Floridi’s recent concept of ‘distant writing’ fundamentally reshapes the nature and future of literature in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs). Building on Franco Moretti’s notion of distant reading, Floridi demonstrates how authorship shifts from direct textual production to the design of narrative constraints, transforming the writer into a meta-author. Reframing this shift through Roland Barthes’ idea of the ‘death of the author’ and Umberto Eco’s concepts of the ‘open work’ and the ‘model reader,’ this paper argues that literature now unfolds within a new paradigm: what is here termed ‘distant literature.’ In this model, the author’s traditional authority dissolves, while the reader’s role expands to that of a co-designer and active interpreter of generative, machine-mediated texts. At the same time, the paper critically problematizes the metaphor of ‘machine enunciation,’ clarifying the status of artificial intelligence (AI) not as an intentional co-enunciator but as an operator or medium whose outputs nevertheless produce enunciative effects for which responsibility remains human and institutional. Finally, the paper addresses the question of ‘literariness’ by arguing that distant literature cannot be grounded solely in interpretive activity: it also depends on formal-aesthetic constraints, textual opacity, and framing practices that make a work recognizable as literature. To illustrate these tensions, the paper presents ‘The Barthes-Eco Simulation’ – an AI-generated dialogue staging an imagined encounter between Barthes and Eco, revealing how distant literature foregrounds co-authorship, interpretive agency, and the renewed need to theorize enunciation and literariness under generative conditions.

 
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