Macchine, linguaggi e immaginari letterari dell’IA nella germanistica

This issue of Cultura Tedesca (n. 71, January–June 2026) collects the proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Italian Association of German Studies (AIG), held in Pisa in June 2025. Edited by Elena Bellavia, Raul Calzoni, Emilia Fiandra, Federica Missaglia, and Francesco Rossi, the volume is titled Machines, Automata, and Artificial Intelligence in German Literature and Language and brings together contributions from literary studies, media history, and linguistics around a shared question: what becomes of the human when the machine is no longer merely a tool, but an environment, an interlocutor, and an autonomous producer of signs? The essays trace a wide arc — from the dystopian imaginaries of industrial modernity to contemporary digital fiction, from seventeenth-century combinatorial language experiments to generative literature, and from aesthetic reflections on AI-generated images to applied questions in corpus linguistics, translation, language teaching, and speech synthesis. Together, they argue that AI is not a neutral technological object but a transversal category that reshapes subjectivity, authorship, memory, and the boundaries between human competence and algorithmic delegation. The volume is organized in two parts. The first engages with literary and cultural-historical perspectives, examining works by Andreas Eschbach, Benjamin Stein, Eugen Ruge, and Alexander Kluge, as well as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the theoretical legacy of Max Bense. The second part addresses linguistic and applied dimensions, including corpus-based translation studies, the computational detection of evaluative language, AI-mediated language learning in tandem settings, and the emotional synthesis of German speech. The introduction frames the whole as a call for critical literacy that combines historical awareness with technological consciousness — one capable of distinguishing simulation from truth, and of hearing the human where the machine seems to have taken its place.