Digital technologies have profoundly reshaped literature, not only transforming traditional reading habits but also introducing innovative forms of narrative creation and consumption. Audiobooks, as a convergence of oral tradition and digital media, serve as a prime example of this evolution by reintegrating auditory storytelling into the fabric of contemporary literary experience. This research explores how the production of audiobooks redefines the boundaries of literature and its reception in the digital age.

Drawing on examples from leading audiobook platforms such as Himalaya and Dragonfly FM, this study analyses how professional-generated content (PGC), user-generated content (UGC), and professionally-user-generated content (PUGC) intersect in audiobook creation. Meanwhile, advances in AI-driven text-to-speech (TTS) technology have enabled the large-scale production of audiobooks, making them more accessible to diverse audiences across platforms like WeChat Reading and Jinjiang Reading. While these innovations democratize literature, they also raise critical questions about the erosion of creative plurality and the potential alienation of audiences through algorithmic standardization.

This research addresses the tension between human-mediated and AI-generated audiobook production. Traditional audiobooks rely on performative interpretations to convey emotional depth and artistic nuance, enriching the narrative experience. In contrast, AI-produced audiobooks prioritize efficiency and scalability, potentially diminishing the diversity of storytelling and reducing the act of reading to a commodified exchange. Furthermore, algorithmic recommendation systems employed by platforms influence user behaviour, limiting agency and transforming literary consumption into a digitally controlled experience.

Key questions explored include: How does AI-mediated audiobook production impact the transmission of literary and artistic value? Can AI replicate the performative and emotional depth traditionally conveyed by human narrators? Does the integration of AI foster "hyper-social interactions" that enhance audience engagement, or does it exacerbate the alienation inherent in technologically mediated experiences?

By examining the implications of intelligent audiobook production, this study contributes to the discourse on literature in the digital age, particularly the interplay between technology, creativity, and audience agency.

In the context of the intermedia narrative and cultural integration, the virtual world of video games has three levels of "crossing boundaries" based on the existence of literariness, that is, crossing the boundary of the video games themselves (Infinite Possibilities): The first part discusses the relationship between media convergence and “literariness”. This synergy between various media platforms opens new vistas for storytelling and engagement. Media convergence deeply affects contemporary literature and makes "literariness" broadly possible and ubiquitous. The second part explains that in the context of convergent culture, literariness is possible to exist as a "story-universe" in video games. The open-world structure inherent in many video games cultivates environments rich with infinite narrative possibilities, which makes the "story-universe" (with infinite possibilities at the fictional level) possible (also due to the parasitism of literariness). The third part discusses the notion of otaku and “infant-universe”. This concept was first proposed by Hong Kong urban new generation writer Dong Qizhang in the three-part novel "Time History. Dumb Porcelain Light". The “infant-universe" is born from the limitations and possibilities of life" and "between reality and imagination", "opening a gap of possibilities" for real life, so that life can "walk to the edge of infinity". "Infant-universe" boldly blurs the line between fiction and reality，which means a world parallel to reality with infinite possibilities. The unique perspectives of committed otakus, coupled with the "circular reversible" nature of contemporary existence, facilitate the realization of "infant-universe" (at the real level) in our actual lives. Therefore, as a form of video games that is deeply mixed with literariness, they have become the most profound existence with the most possibilities and uncertainties in the “kaleidoscope” of media convergence, while also having a profound impact on the real world.

From the ubiquitous "literariness" to the "story-universe" and finally to the "infant-universe", this article creatively sorts out a possible path for the coexistence of video games and literature in the context of a convergent culture and the heights that can be achieved. The three levels represent the three stages of the "crossing of boundaries" of video games. If the third stage can be achieved on a large scale, the cognition of the material world, time and the universe may be rewritten again.

It is not novel for literature to be viewed as a ‘composite’ art or medium, which has different arts, media, and modes of representation within it. In literary studies, multimodal fiction is studied as one of the manifestations of this idea, and the multimodal novel is understood as a novel that integrates nonverbal modes of meaning-making, such as, e.g. photographs, maps, handwritten letters, etc., into its narrative discourse (Hallet 2018, 26). The multimodal novel has been conventionally conceived as a printed book, since the genre is believed to actively rely on nonverbal textual elements when conveying narrative details (Wagoner 2014, 2). But what would it mean for a multimodal novel to be realised by means of another technical medium, when its core practice is to utilise the conventions of the print novels in new ways?

In this paper, I examine how multimodal novels, which are remediated as audiobooks, engage with nonverbal textual elements that they rely on in their printed forms. Are the narrative details – that are based on nonverbal modes of meaning-making in printed books – modified, left out, or replaced by other modes of meaning-making in audiobooks? Do multimodal novels become monomodal when they get transformed into audiobooks? Or should audiobooks not be viewed as a medium that limits the possibilities to convey narrative information of printed multimodal novels?

Considering the fact that all novels are multimodal, I start the paper by defining the multimodal novel, proposing different degrees of narrative details’ dependence on nonverbal modes of meaning-making, that is, whether they are inherent elements of or complimentary tools for the narrative construction. I then differentiate novels as audiobooks and printed novels as separate media (according to Lars Elleström’s model of media’s modalities, modes, and qualifying aspects (2014)) to exemplify possible modal changes that printed multimodal novels (of different degrees of narratives’ dependence on nonverbal modes of meaning-making) can undergo when being remediated as auditory texts.

I proceed with the analysis of several multimodal novels – “Extremely Loud and Incredibely Close” by J. Safran Foer (2005), “The Raw Shark Texts” by S. Hall (2007), “Night Film” by M. Pessl (2013), “S” written by D. Dorst and conceived by J. J. Abrams (2013) – in their printed and auditory manifestations. These primary texts may be argued to be not “suitable” for the audiobook format as they heavily rely on the materiality of the medium of printed novel and, hence, serve as curious examples to demonstrate how audiobooks transform the multimodal narratives of printed books. I conclude that multimodal novels as auditory texts not only remain multimodal narratives but also give researchers another reason to view audiobooks as not a kind of remediation but an independent medium (Have and Pederson 2021, 214), contributing to the ongoing discussion of the status of audiobooks in media terms.

How do New Materialism and intermedial studies reshape traditional literary criticism within memory studies? This presentation addresses this question by shifting the focus from trauma theory to material processes and technologies of mediation. I will examine how "El clan Braniff" (2018), an intermedial novel by Chilean author Matías Celedon, engages with Chile’s dictatorial past through a montage of judiciary records, analogue slide images, and late-1970s visual advertising. I will interpret this novel as a formal experiment in what Fuller and Weizman term “investigative aesthetics” (2021), fostering an “expanded state of aesthetic alertness” to the infrastructures transforming social reality and the acceleration of mediatization, described by Andrew Hoskins as the intensified “impact of the media upon processes of social change so that everyday life is increasingly embedded in the mediascape.”

The novel borrows its title from the 1970s U.S based Braniff airline, which it exposes as part of an international network of political persecution, arms and drug trafficking tied to Pinochet’s regime, remnants of the Nazi elite and Latin American cartels. By discentering character-driven narrative with a documentarian emphasis on infrastructure, the novel demands a materialist reading, as it frames historical violence through the logistics of commercial aviation rather than personal trauma. The juxtaposition highlights the dependence of the Chilean Army’s para-legal networks on commercial jets as the iconic technology of late-capitalist globalization (Vanessa Schwartz). Moreover, this also suggests how political repression across Latin America paved the way for such a new stage of capitalist expansionism to take off.

Further, I analyze how "El clan Braniff" incorporates a history of Braniff’s visual branding to establish a continuity between its sleek air travel marketing and the deregulated transnational circulation of capital. The novel’s intermedial strategy underscores how corporate branding masked a geopolitical reality where tourism and privatization intersected with covert counter-insurgency.

Finally, I analyze how the novel redefines fiction’s role in historical recollection. Contextualizing its plot around a real case of political assassination, it speculates from the perspective of accomplices who were not submitted to trial, narrating their disappearance within the blind spots of justice. By incorporating a collection of found analogue slides as part of its narrative, "El clan Braniff" stresses the epistemic opacity of images and the limits of historiographic and judicial knowledge. By doing so, the novel demonstrates fiction’s unique potential to offer at least a speculative counter-history of State terrorism—one that history struggles to articulate fully. However, such counter-history would seem to require pushing the boundaries of “literariness“ towards an intermedial and materialist approach.