Constructive Rereading: Incompletion, Assemblage, and the Virtual in Postmodern and Digital Literary Cultures

Abstract

The study investigates the culture of incompletion in postmodern and contemporary literature through the prism of constructive rereading. Examining the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Julian Barnes, it demonstrates how rereading functions as a playful, rhizomatic process of assemblage that disrupts linear narrative closure and prefigures the virtual multiplicities of new media environments. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ conception of rereading as play rather than consumption, the analysis reveals these authors’ shared rejection of pre-established novelistic forms in favor of fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextual distortion. Borges’ translations and forking paths, Calvino’s combinatorial literature machines, and Barnes’ fabulations of history and replicas collectively embody textual emancipation, where incompletion becomes a generative force.
This study bridges print-based literary theory with digital paradigms, engaging concepts such as hypertext, cybertext, ergodic literature, and N. Katherine Hayles’ cognitive assemblages. It argues that constructive rereading virtualizes the printed page, enabling momentary hybrid spaces that blur real/virtual boundaries and foster collective, ongoing narrativization. In an era of blogs, wikis, electronic literature, and AI-mediated texts, this practice sustains literature’s vitality as a relational, desiring system always in production. Ultimately, the article posits constructive rereading as essential for navigating epistemic flux, offering pathways for future scholarship in digital humanities, decolonial studies, and ecolinguistics.