Epistemological Transformation of the Paradigm of Literary Studies in the Context of the Integration of Digital Humanities Methods

The epistemological transformation of literary studies in the context of digital humanities and the post-humanities shift challenges traditional hermeneutic paradigms, requiring a fundamental reconsideration of literariness, authorship, and textuality. This article explores the impact of distant reading and computational methodologies on contemporary literary analysis, particularly within postcolonial and feminist criticism. By integrating large-scale textual analysis with AI-driven methods, distant reading unveils new historical, structural, and thematic patterns while simultaneously raising critical concerns regarding representation, data selection, and algorithmic biases. The study examines how digital humanities methodologies, such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis, reshape the interpretation of gender and race in literary history. Case studies demonstrate how AI-assisted literary analysis reveals structural imbalances in representation, while feminist and decolonial critiques highlight the ethical imperatives of corpus formation, algorithmic transparency, and epistemic inclusivity. The findings underscore the methodological and ideological tensions between computational literary studies and traditional close reading approaches, advocating for a hybrid model that integrates quantitative insights with hermeneutic depth.Ultimately, this article argues that digital methodologies not only expand the analytical scope of literary research but also redefine the epistemological foundations of the discipline. The intersection of distant reading with feminist and decolonial critique destabilizes canonical hierarchies, urging scholars to critically engage with the political dimensions of digital research. By foregrounding the ethical challenges of AI-driven analysis, this study contributes to ongoing debates on the future of literary studies in the digital age, advocating for a more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and critically reflexive approach to literary scholarship.