How Is Tech Criticism Possible?On the Significance of Digital Technology as a Paradigm of Literary Criticism

Chai Dongdong

Hangzhou Normal University

Abstract: Technology is one of the basic dimensions of literary criticism, but it is often ignored for multiple reasons. As digital technology intervenes in literary production, literary criticism is being approached through the technological dimension. Technology-Based literary criticism now transcends linguistic centrism, using digital technology as a means and method of literary criticism, and bringing technology to the center stage of literary criticism. Technology-Based literary criticism, which features an intersection of interpretive and empirical perspectives, triggers multiple transmutations of the subjects of literary criticism, and also enriches the connotations of literary texts. Tech criticism came from, and has evolved with the changes of literary criticism in the productive forces and the relations of production, which are driven by digital technology. What digital technology has opened up for literary criticism is a comprehensive field, where literary criticism is in a transboundary dynamic of “relational production.” Therefore, we need to develop a sense of relation and a sense of systems to better interpret present-day literary criticism.

Keywords: literary criticism, criticism of technology/tech criticism, transformation of criticism, technological turn

Literary criticism is subject to the overall field of artistic production and features both synchrony and diachrony, notwithstanding its subjectivity and individuality. From the “linguistic turn” and the “cultural turn,” to the “image turn” and the “new media turn,” a variety of elements (language, culture, image, intermediary, etc.) have respectively constrained literary production in a given period, and subsequently triggered paradigm shifts in the field of literary criticism. In recent years, driven by a fresh wave of digital transformations, new literary forms, such as interactive fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) fiction, and virtual reality (VR) fiction have emerged one after another. There are intensive interactions with digital technology in all aspects of literature (form, style, narrative mode, social impact, aesthetic function, productive forces, relations of production, etc.). In such a context, the field of literary criticism also begins to draw on digital technology. While focusing on new changes in literature, the application has also included criticism of itself, and the “technological turn” in literary criticism has become a subject of heated debate in the theoretical realm. Will digital technology give rise to a new paradigm of technology-based literary criticism? If so, what problem domains will technology-based literary criticism have, and what operating law will it follow? This article attempts to find answers to these questions.

Technology as a Paradigm of Literary Criticism

Can technology be directly related to literary criticism?①The technology discussed in this article is tangible technology as a “tool,” not intangible technology as a “skill/technique.”Most people do not think so. They hold that literary criticism has no direct relation to technology, because it is about theoretical discussions of the aesthetics, ideology, and values of literary works as verbal expressions, and also of writers, literary phenomena, literary trends, and schools. Those who hold such a view focus only on the metaphysical speculation of critical activity and see literary criticism as a text-based linguistic analysis for the purpose of searching for meaning, values, and ideas behind literary works as a representational system. To put it another way, their primary concern is what criticism is and what it is meant to do. M. H. Abrams, an American literary critic, defines literary criticism as “the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature” (Abrams, 2009, p. 100). Another American literary critic Fredric Jameson argues that literary criticism is “not so much an interpretation of content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, a restoration of the original message, the original experience, from beneath the distortions of the censor” (Jameson, 2004, pp. 80-82). Literary criticism, whether it is about analysis, evaluation, or mining of information and experience, is explicitly presented as a rational or perceptual intellectual activity that involves value judgments and draws support from language to search for meanings. This view has its rational grounds and should be a key topic of literary criticism. Yet, this does not mean that literary criticism can ignore its relation to technology.

The close relation of literature itself with technology gives technology a unique place in the field of literary criticism. Literature is a text system that is based on language and capable of creating aesthetic imagery, conveying emotions, and expressing specific subjective perceptions and values.①As the concept and evolution of literature are quite complex, only a simplified definition is given here.In contrast to art forms, such as painting, sculpture, and dance, literature is more about intellectual dimensions, and remains associated with tangible technology (tools, processes, equipment, intermediaries, etc.). As pointed out by Walter Benjamin (2014, p. 20) inDer Autor als Produzent[The Author as Producer], technology is a major determinant of artistic creation, and the advancement of technology determines the advancement of artistic creation. It is fair to say that technological developments are crucial to the historical evolution of literature. In terms of carrier, the emergence of oral literature, written literature, and Internet literature are dependent on the development of mediating technologies. In terms of content, science fiction, military fiction, and game fiction have come into being thanks to mankind’s space exploration and progress in weapons and computer technology. In terms of creative ideas, there is also an underlying technologically rational motive behind the emergence of new literary genres, such as futurism, surrealism, existentialism, and magical realism. The same is also true of creative and expressive techniques. For example, the Chinese written poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties outperformed the Chinese oral poetry of the pre-Qin period in organizational form, linguistic expression, imagery creation, and affective communication. Moreover, language as the basis of literature is actually related to technology. Technological progress helps to change the meaning of language, generate new vocabulary, and diversify its usage.

Historical development shows that almost every important conceptual or methodological transformation of literary criticism was driven by technology. Take the imitation theory, the cornerstone of Western literary criticism, as an example. The imitation theory would not have come into being without tools of artistic production and dissemination, such as pens and parchment. The “mirror” and “representation” paradigms of literary criticism that spawned from the imitation theory during the Renaissance were actually directly related to the invention of the mirror as a visual tool and the perspective as a method. Since the beginning of the 20th century, critical paradigms, such as form criticism, “new criticism,” narratology, and structuralism, were successively developed. They were a continuation of scientism from the 17th and 18th centuries, with a distinct technological logic behind them. Since the second half of the 20th century, emerging electronic communication technologies, such as radio, television, film, and the Internet, have been introduced to the field of literary production and dissemination. Subsequently, cultural studies, media criticism, image criticism, and Internet literary criticism came into being one after another, exerting a far-reaching influence. All such transformations were essentially related to either change in the mode of production of material things or technological revolution and were therefore inevitable outcomes of new technology-driven progress in productive forces and improvement of human mindset.

Although the coupling of technology and literary criticism is inevitable, there is an implicit role for technology in literary criticism. After all, the evolution of technological intervention in literature is a slow process. For example, it was nearly two thousand years after the formation of (paper-based) written literature that Internet literature and photographic literature were developed. This slow process makes it easy for criticism itself to ignore the impact of technology. The result of technological intervention in the subject of literary criticism is an indirect impact. In most cases, the subject (i.e., the critic) conducts a literary analysis to interpret the meaning,①This is determined by the system of aesthetic ideology, which sees literature as implications of discourse.or answer the author-related questions, thereby exploring the political, economic, social, and aesthetic factors hidden between the lines. Lionello Venturi (2005, p. 11), an Italian art critic, asks, “What is criticism if not a relationship between a principle of judgment and the intuition of a work of art or of an artistic personality?” The emphasis on author/artist and work often reduces technology to a mere intermediary, preventing it from approaching the center stage of literary criticism. In addition, literature as a social ideology created by man is inherently convergent with socially conscious activities concerning politics, culture, and economy, and is therefore influential enough to sway the subject’s choice. That is why technology is unlikely to be a focus of literary criticism.

Technology’s role in literary criticism becomes explicit as it intervenes directly in the practice of literary production, generating a number of new literary genres, phenomena, and trends based on or named after technology. The era of mechanical reproduction, represented by camera and cinematograph, marked the beginning of technology as a real paradigm of literary criticism. Walter Benjamin argues in theWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(2008) that mechanical reproduction allows art’s exhibition value [ausstel-lungswert] to displace worship value [kultwert] all along the line, and that the “aura” of the work of art gradually fades away, shifting its reception from attentive concentration to diversion. Benjamin was the first critic in the history of literature and art who systematically addressed a series of technological effects on art. Literature as a form of art naturally cannot skip this process. The most prominent manifestation is the change of imagery creation in literature. The generation of literary imagery is directly related to abstract and discursive language. “It (literary imagery) does not refer to a visual image full of emotion, but rather to an abstract image reflective of insight acquired by the reader through text decoding” (Chai, 2013, p. 78). Mechanical reproduction, through mass production of images, amplifies sensory presence and intuitive experience in artistic production, making the visible “image” increasingly important and the virtual, abstract “image” on the wane. This can be exemplified by a large number of TV series scripts adapted from web fiction over the past years. In the era of virtual “image” creation, which is dominated by digital technology, the change of imagery is even more dramatic. There are numerous scenes featuring “concise depiction but with endless message” in literary works, which require readers’ fertile imagination. Scenes such as the “Havoc in Heaven” (inJourney to the West) and the “Jia Baoyu Visits the Land of Illusion” (inThe Dream of the Red Chamber) can be vividly represented through digital simulations.

In the 21st century, there have been extensive discussions on photographic literature, literary visualization, Internet literature, and new media literature in the community of Chinese literary criticism. These discussions also cover topics on film culture, television culture, and Internet culture, which were already under debate in the 20th century in the West. Literary criticism is shifting from the “print paradigm” to the “electronic paradigm” and the “online paradigm,” with critical discourses emerging successively in the dimensions of images, new media, materiality, Internet, post-human, and AI. In particular, driven by new digital technologies, literary criticism has been driven to go online, has become digital and smart, and has entered a stage of holistic examination of “technology.” Clearly, a distinct “technological turn” in literary criticism is taking place. At this stage, technology has a significant influence on literary and artistic production and even more extensive fields of social life, thus moving from the backstage to the center stage of literary criticism and is attempting to integrate the political, aesthetic, economic, and cultural factors into an organic whole.

Theoretical Guidance of Technology-Based Literary Criticism

The initiation of the “technological turn” means that the paradigms of the previous field of literary criticism are no longer applicable to the interpretation of new phenomena of literary production, dissemination, and consumption. However, it is noteworthy that although the technologies of printing, mechanical reproduction, and electronic communication have influenced literature in various degrees, their influence is not comprehensive. They can only pave the way for the “technological turn” rather than initiate it in the true sense. The technological carriers of the “technological turn” are binary numbers system-enabled digital technologies, such as computers, the mobile Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and AI. Alongside this “technological turn” is a major social transformation:

Unlike traditional technology (e.g., television) which only has an impact on people’s cultural activities, new technologies (IoT, blockchain, big data, AI, etc.) begin to increase their presence in the production of material things or physical manufacturing. New technologies help the world go digital, online, and smart, which aligns with the mode of material production, as well as the mode of cultural and intellectual production in today’s global context (Liu, 2018, pp. 5-12).

At this stage, therefore, digital technology has brought about unprecedented changes in literary production and conception. More importantly, it has deeply integrated with current activities of social production in the areas of economy, culture, education, tourism, medical care, travel, and dining to improve the forms of social interactions and cultural and artistic experiences, and even trigger a drastic reform of the “way of being.” This is a new paradigm in literary criticism which is based on digital technology.

As an approach to the disclosure and judgment of what literary texts imply, tech criticism is no longer confined to linguistic centrism followed by traditional literary criticism, but makes technological elements (imaging, Internet, algorithms, AI, etc.) a focus of the activities of literary criticism. Technology ceases to be attached to language in literary criticism but begins to exist as an independent intermediary. Tech criticism uses digital technology as a perspective and method of literary interpretation, attaching importance to the meaning generated through the intervention of digital technology in the production of literary texts (content, theme, narrative, genre) and to the function, value, and impact of technological elements in the process of literary dissemination, consumption, reception, derivation, and regeneration. Moreover, as digital technology’s interventions in various fields of social production have brought about a “technology plus” trend, its intervention in literature shows a distinct dynamic of “big literature” or “big art” accordingly. Thanks to such a dynamic, the aesthetic, cultural, and social functions of literature on which traditional literary criticism focuses, are restarted by technology in a new dimension and thus gain new meaning, instead of being weakened.

Digital technology-based criticism features an intersection of interpretive and empirical perspectives. The purpose of literary criticism is to discover the aesthetic value of a text and the deeper meaning behind it. The subject of literary criticism must go deep into the reading of a literary work and take the initiative to grasp it before interpreting it with the help of specific tools. According to Wilhelm Dilthey:

That is indeed the immeasurable significance of literature for our understanding of spiritual life and of history, for only in language does inner human life find its complete, exhaustive, and objectively understandable expression. That is why the art of understanding centers on the exegesis or interpretation of those remains of human reality preserved in written form (Dilthey, 2001, p. 77).

Gadamer asserts that “the only condition to which literature is subject is being handed down in language and taken up in reading” and that “reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation” (Gadamer, 2010, p. 235). Literary criticism is characterized by highly subjective experience, which is expository and constructive. “It is universally true of texts that only in the process of understanding them is the dead trace of meaning transformed back into living meaning” (Gadamer, 2010, p. 240). Digital technology-based criticism as a special form of literary criticism certainly has this interpretive characteristic. But beyond that, digital technology-based criticism can rely on technological convenience to free itself from paper literature. By analyzing the data of literary texts through computation, researchers can add empirical evidence to traditionally subjective, interpretive, and constructive literary criticism. On the one hand, the digitization of mass texts of art helps create a large database. Using web technology, corresponding retrieval and analysis tools, and intelligent algorithms, researchers can get clues and extract relevant information accurately, and make digital media do certain parts of the work previously done by humans to increase research efficiency. On the other hand, digital tools and corresponding apps make it possible to introduce methods of empirical research from the areas of mathematics, statistics, and science to literary criticism, enabling the subject (critic) to rely on relevant models or analysis techniques to conduct more in-depth and comprehensive text mining and to balance qualitative research. As AI has been integrated into art documentation, database creation, audience surveys, and text analysis, a new style of literary criticism, namely, AI-made criticism (e.g., Read Laixi) has come into being. Compared with man-made criticism, such AI/machine-made criticism is more empirical and objective.

Digital technology-based criticism has triggered multiple transmutations of the subjects of literary criticism. Traditional literary criticism is an individual interpretation, which is based on personal experience, learning, established understanding, and worldview, and is usually one person’s work. The subject of criticism is supposed to restore the meaning of the text itself from the perspective of “otherness” with an objective and dispassionate attitude. According to scholars, such as E.D. Hirsch and Schleiermacher, the subject should reconstruct the author’s original meaning with an objective and dispassionate attitude. Even those theorists who advocate the subject’s dialogue with the text to generate new meaning (Gadamer, Jauss, etc.) still believe that the activity of literary criticism requires personal reading. Such a personal act of criticism remains to be the business restricted to scholars and researchers in the academic world. There is a lack of effective interactions between different subjects of literary criticism, between the subject and the author, and between the subject and the reader. With the intervention of digital technology, literature is disseminated via the Internet, making literary consumption and criticism an everyday activity. Online literary criticism allows for timely social exchange. There are a large number of literary criticism-themed accounts on platforms, such as Douban, Toutiao, and the WeChat Official Accounts Platform. Literary criticism is now opened to various subjects, such as readers, authors, and media professionals, instead of being exclusively controlled by professional critics.

Digital media are supposed to eliminate concentration, blocking, stagnation, segmentation, boundary, hierarchy, and differentiation, and to bring about real and practical communication, interaction, linkage, integration, and cooperation between/among subjects, making their activities smooth, coherent, productive, and harmonious, and endowing subjects of culture with “digital modernity” (Shan, 2017, pp. 149-155).

This will undoubtedly dissolve the scholarly, definitive or authoritative criticism advocated by academics. The field of literary criticism will transform from an individualized field to an interactive scenario where there are multiple subjects communicating with each other.

Digital technology-based criticism also enriches the connotations of literary texts. With the change of subjects and the fusion of empirical, interpretive, and constructive characteristics, the traditional mode of meaning construction in literary texts, which relies on personal association, perception, experience, and reflection, will lose its absolute dominance due to technological intervention. For example, some apps for literary criticism lack a certain reflective and aesthetic interpretation of literature. The relative certainty of textual meaning will be dissolved by diversified subjects of criticism. The meaning construction in literature will incorporate more ideologies with the support of technology to develop in a more open and diversified way. This is the case with short, concise, prompt, and interactive online criticisms from numerous netizens (from all walks of life). In addition, the interpretive objects of digital technology-based criticism are more than aesthetic symbols in a language, and may also include images, data, and apps. Given that, the subject of criticism will have to take these elements into consideration, and the established criticism, which requires aesthetic contemplation, may give way to a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile engagements or experiences. Subsequently, the meaning of literature may not be so elegant, critical, aesthetic, individualistic, and pioneering as constructed by traditional academic criticism; instead, it will be considerably entertaining, secular, superficial, and homogeneous. After all, driven by digital technology, literature itself has inevitably fallen into the narrative mechanisms of commerce, fleeting pleasures, consumption, and desire, and so has literary criticism. This is a more complicated construction of textual meaning, and its coverage will be far beyond that of the literary criticism.

Logic Behind the Production of Technology-Based Literary Criticism

The paradigm of tech criticism echoes the intervention of digital technology in all aspects of literary production, dissemination, and consumption. Does the paradigm have an evolutionary logic or operating law of its own? It is understood that literature is a special activity of artistic production. Karl Marx was the first person to assert that literature/art is also a form of production. Since then, the productive properties and characteristics of literature/art have been thoroughly discussed by many theorists, among whom were Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Macherey, and Terry Eagleton. Literary criticism, as an art subordinate to critics, remains to be part of the literary field and a necessary component of literary activity, although it has relative independence. Based on this premise, we can also conclude that literary criticism is also a productive activity (Yao, 2019). This conclusion contains two meanings. First, literary criticism is certainly productive, playing an important role in interpreting the significance and value of literature and in promoting knowledge production, economic growth, and social development of humanity as a whole. Second, literary criticism has generated various discourses, methods, tools, styles, objects, and subjects in the process of continuous inheritance and innovation over the past thousands of years. In other words, literary criticism is productive because of its construction of literary practice and critical theory. Following this logic, it is clear that the emergence of the paradigm of tech criticism is an inevitable outcome of literary criticism as a productive activity. Now that it is a productive activity, there must be potential changes in the productive forces and the relations of production (from which, an analogy can be drawn with criticism as production) behind it, and such changes form a driving force of criticism.

In terms of the productive forces, from the perspective of Marxist literary criticism, the productive forces of literature and art first and foremost concern intellectual productivity (i.e., the intelligence and ability to engage in the production of intellectual products), yet they cannot go without specific tangible media (i.e., the subject, the object, and the intermediary in practice). The productive forces of literature and art are a combination of “mind” (intelligence) and “matter” (tangible things), although “matter” remained obscure for a considerable period of time in the past. The production of literary criticism, as part of literary production, certainly covers the two basic dimensions. It is just that the intervention of digital technology makes the previously implicit “matter” explicit. Digital technology converts image, text, and sound into binary numbers for the purposes of storing, computing, processing, and transmitting. As digital technology is a distinct matter, literary criticism, whether targeted or intermediated by digital technology, is primarily characterized by materiality. This is the case, for example, with AI-based and app-based literary criticism. As the object and the intermediary are digitized, the subject of literary criticism is also endowed with materiality. Moreover, the object’s ability to search for the meaning of a literary text, and to reflect on and improve a critical discourse is inevitably shaped by digital technology. Currently, digital technology has intervened in literature in an all-around way, opening a comprehensive field of digital culture. The subject of literary criticism therein relies on digital technology to enable criticism, and also to maintain his or her way of life. Consequently, the subject’s cultural habit, literary experience, aesthetic consciousness, artistic cultivation, and even values are all without exception unconsciously subject to technological construction. Mike Featherstone and Marshall McLuhan respectively used the terms “new cultural intermediaries” and “visual man” to refer to the subject of cultural production under the influence of electronic technology. The “new humans” have one thing in common: having an unconscious identification with media technology, with their experience of media technology being a basic part of their physical existence. Such a judgment is still wearing well today when people cannot live without digital technology in daily life or even in social production.

The prominence of materiality represents the control of digital technology over the subject, the object, and the intermediary of literary criticism with the productive forces of digital technologybased criticism arising therefrom. Yet, this does not mean that intellectual productivity is weakened, but that the intellectual and material dimensions are combined into one at this stage, as opposed to the fragmentation prior to the era of tech criticism. The combination results from the reliance of contemporary literary production on digital technology, and is also related to the subject’s current dependence on technology in daily life. On the whole, the productive forces of tech criticism in the digital context are presented as comprehensive kinetic energy released in the following process: “technology’s intervention in literature—literature’s response to technology—literature’s initiation of criticism—criticism’s response to literature—literature’s promotion of technology.” This process is dynamically reciprocal, allowing tech criticism to turn from implicit to explicit while moving towards the center stage of literary criticism. This special existence, which is generated through the intervention of technology in literary criticism and production, is permanently interpretive, constructive, and empirical to literary activities, while at the same time distinctly rhetorical. In other words, by virtue of its inherent aesthetic potential, humanistic touch, media properties, and value rationality, digital technology has given rise to a unique ideology, and artfully produced and disseminated it, thus covertly promoting continuous intervention in literary criticism. In the whole process, however, relevant subjects of criticism do not put themselves under any coercive force, but unconsciously accept the ideology conveyed by digital technology.

In terms of the relations of production, literary criticism is a relational field, which, according to Abrams (2009), consists of four elements: “the universe (subject), the work (object), the artist (author) and the audience (recipient).” The combination and pairing of these elements are crucial to the style of literary criticism. In the Marxist view, the relations of production are directly determined by the productive forces, and by the structure of the main social forces. According to Friedrich Engels, such main social forces are shaped by a “parallelogram of forces.” Engels argued:

History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus, there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historical event. This may be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition (Marx & Engels, 1995, p. 697).

Apply this logic to the field of tech criticism, and we can see that the four elements of criticism are inevitably linked to digital technology due to their circumstances. Digital technology keeps shaping their activities of production and life and facilitates their interconnections. Take Internet literary criticism, a form of tech criticism, as an example. During the production, Internet literary criticism relies on the Internet, smartphones, computers, and other intermediaries to connect the subject of criticism to the object of criticism (the work), the reader, and the author. Digital technology is both a historical context and a historical force. To some extent, digital technology has enabled the formation of a new “parallelogram of forces,” which in turn promotes the technological turn in literary criticism and the technicalization of the relations of production.

The technicalized relations of production are composite relations concerning political economics and ideology. By ideology, this paper mainly refers to aesthetic ideology. And the aesthetic relation is formed when the subject of criticism transforms everyday aesthetic ideology. From the perspective of political economics, digital technology allows the materials of literary criticism to be possessed by multiple subjects in multiple dimensions through multiple approaches. All critics, from scholars to online amateurs, can criticize a text from their own perspectives in a preferred method, mode, and style with the help of digital technology. Different subjects of criticism relate to each other and construct themselves through digital technology, bringing about changes in the relations concerning the possession, distribution, and exchange of materials of literary criticism. From the perspective of ideology, digital technology has shaken the traditional system, which requires a certain distance (e.g., worship from a distance) and a specific attitude (e.g., quiet observation) between the subject of literary criticism and the text in order to underline the significance of criticism itself (rationality of science, reflexivity, etc.); subsequently, literary criticism can be casual, improvisational, occasional, and even irrelevant and vulgar. These characteristics can be found in the style, language, and form ofFan Ren Fan Yu(Mundane Words), a model of Internet literary criticism. In essence, this dynamic has resulted from the practice of a new digital technology-based relationship between the cultural subject and the cultural object, and it makes possible the interactions and communications among multiple persons and the timely reception, conversion, and retransmission of cultural objects (Poster, 2010, p. 17). Mark Poster calls the subject in this new context the postmodern subject, which is de-subjectified and features “intersubjectivity” in Edmund Husserl’s words. It is precisely the changes in the entire relational field that empower digital technology-based criticism with enduring subject-level momentum.

In terms of practice, digital technology features a strong coupling effect and is a comprehensive phenomenon of social production and consumption. The emerging technology-based literary criticism and its new features concerning the productive forces and the relations of production are inseparable from a series of contemporary trends, such as the consumption of digital technology as an everyday cultural product, the integration of culture and technology, the industrialization of culture, the popularization of aesthetics in daily life, and the pan-entertainment in cultural realms. This inseparability shows that the current field of literary criticism is not independent or autonomous, but is in a transboundary dynamic of “relational production.” Internally, the field of literary criticism is characterized by mutual construction of the following pairs: one subject and another, the subject and the object, digital technology and the subject, digital technology and the object, as well as one digital technology and another, while externally, the field is characterized by mutual construction of the following pairs: tech criticism and literary criticism, literary criticism and cultural/artistic criticism, as well as cultural/artistic criticism and cultural economy/politics/aesthetics/society. Thus, it can be seen that digital technology has opened an even bigger field for literary criticism, whose examination requires a sense of the system.

Although digital technology contributes positively to the reform of literary criticism, it is not without limitations. On the one hand, literary criticism is an activity that features distinct value judgments of the critic, and which plays a positive role in the development of art. If technology becomes the leading factor, or if a machine becomes the subject of criticism, how to maintain the positive and effective role of literary criticism will be a question. On the other hand, although technology has greatly facilitated the development of literary criticism and the changes in its form, how to free literary criticism from undesirable factors (abuse, slander, ridicule, nihility, deconstruction, flattering, etc.) for sustainable development remains to be a topic for further thinking. In short, given that literary criticism in the digital era cannot avoid the technological dimension, proper application of digital technology to literary criticism is now at the core of the reform of literary criticism.