To the extent that contemporary literature can irritate common understandings of literature and the present, it can also function as a stimulus and corrective for literary studies that do not always already presuppose to know what literature is. This has recently become visible in confrontations with social media, in which literary and time-diagnostic modes of writing come together in different ways in experiments with digital tools, as in the context of more conventional forms of literature and corresponding theoretical discourses, to (...) produce what can be called »representing the present«. (shrink)