RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
A1 Brija, Abdelghani
T1 Artificial intelligence as a figure of literary imagination in Fantasia: contes et légendes de l'intelligence artificielle by Laura Sibony
JF Romanica Olomucensia
YR 2025
VO 37
IS 2
SP 283
OP 297
DO 10.5507/ro.2025.018
UL https://romanica.upol.cz/artkey/rom-202502-0004.php
AB This article offers a reading of Fantasia: Contes et légendes de l'intelligence artificielle by Laura Sibony as a poetic and critical exploration of artificial intelligence conceived as a figure of literary imagination. Far from technophobic narratives or utilitarian visions, artificial intelligence is approached as a mirror of the human subject, revealing its anxieties, desires, and paradoxes. Through a mythic constellation, from the Demiurge to Prometheus and from the Double to the Golem, Sibony situates AI within the continuity of the great figures of creation, questioning both the delegation of creative power and the Promethean temptation of humankind to become divine. This mythocritical approach is intertwined with an aesthetic of narrative and linguistic hybridity. Each short story in Fantasia adopts a singular form, fragmentary, poetic, essayistic, or satirical, that reflects the shifting and plural nature of artificial intelligence. Thus, literature becomes a laboratory of thought in which the coexistence of human and machine, of technique and sensibility, is tested and reimagined. Through writing infused with philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytic references, Fantasia shifts the debate on AI towards the realm of subjectivity, symbolism, and language. In doing so, Laura Sibony offers a rereading of the contemporary world in which technology is no longer a mere tool, but a true agent of fiction and a catalyst for aesthetic and existential metamorphoses. Here, artificial intelligence does not destroy the literary, but reinvents it.