Literature and technology: the transformation of literature in the digital era

Abstract

In the wake of the digital revolution, literature has undergone a paradigmatic transformation that reconfigures authorship, narrative structure, and reader engagement within a multimodal, interactive environment. Several research has examined the democratization of self-publishing and the proliferation of electronic and hypertextual narratives, but here remains a critical gap in integrating speech act theory with the study of ambiguous artistic structures across classical, modernist, postmodernist, and digital texts. Thus, this research aims to elucidate the functional role of speech acts in literary meaning‐making and to analyze how structural ambiguity fosters interpretive collaboration between text and reader. We found that speech acts operate as performative engines that actively shape narrative progression and reader cognition, while ambiguous structures invite readers to assume co‐authorial roles, thereby destabilizing fixed meanings and traditional authorial authority. Moreover, the expansion of digital publishing and algorithm‐driven platforms highlights urgent challenges related to intellectual property rights, quality assurance, and the long‐term preservation of digital literary heritage. In the research it is concluded that existing critical and pedagogical models must be revised to address emergent narrative modalities and to cultivate multiliteracies that empower both creators and consumers of digital texts. We believe future research should investigate how nascent media technologies continue to inherit and transform these communicative dynamics, advancing both theoretical understanding and practical strategies for sustaining a vibrant literary ecosystem in the twenty‐first century.