Exploring Identity, Trauma, And Ai in Greek Lessons, Land of Milk and Honey, And The Unsettled

Abstract

Recent Anglophone fiction has foregrounded urgent intersections of identity, trauma, and technological mediation, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (tr. 2023), C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey (2023), and Ayana Mathis’s The Unsettled (2023) collectively interrogate the possibilities and failures of human survival amid linguistic rupture, ecological collapse, and racialized dispossession. Each text expands the definition of “intelligence” beyond cognitive or computational functions, conceptualizing it instead as an ethical and relational practice rooted in embodiment, kinship, and vulnerability. By juxtaposing these novels, this article asks: Can AI—through prediction, optimization, and algorithmic mediation—repair the fractures wrought by trauma? Or does healing remain tethered to attentiveness, intimacy, and relational ethics that exceed AI’s scope? This comparative reading argues for an “ethics of un-optimization,” wherein human flourishing emerges not from predictive certainty but from fragile, embodied practices of care.