Abstract This essay examines Death of an Author (2023), an AI-assisted detective novella by “Aidan Marchine” (a collaboration between Stephen Marche and generative AI software), as a case study for understanding the philosophical, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of generative literature. Drawing from theories of authorship and creativity from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Margaret Boden, and Max Kreminski, the author contends that AI functions not as a genre or tool, but as a medium, defined by pastiche, novelty, intertextuality, and strict amplification of human authorial vision. Situating Death of an Author within recent scholarship on AI and literature, this essay contends that this text is a valuable exploration of the enduring questions of generative literature, from a moment just before large language models became normalized.
Abstract This article offers a framework for a systematic exploration and theorization of the premodern literary character. The differences between modern narratology and premodern notions of literature call for a nuanced approach to the literary character. The authors propose five fields of inquiry (ontological status, authorship, mode of presentation, autonomy, tradition) which are based on the specific contexts and conditions of literary characters in premodern texts. The authors provide examples for all five fields drawing from ancient, Byzantine, and medieval English literatures. In doing so, they also make a case for the usefulness of comparative approaches in the study of premodern literatures.
Abstract Oyzer Varshavski’s 1920 novel Shmuglars (Smugglers) depicts a group of shtetl Jews who fend off starvation by distilling whiskey and smuggling contraband into German-occupied Warsaw during World War I. As their activities lead them into greater acts of bravado, criminality, and dissipation, traditional hierarchies among townspeople and families degenerate, and smuggling dramatizes a process of circulation between periphery (the shtetl) and center (Warsaw). This circular dynamic between center and periphery inverts the way that Yiddish embeds traditional Jewish rhetorical devices, while maintaining a peripheral presence among the languages with which it has been situated. In Varshavski’s novel, the presence of transcribed yet untranslated German and Polish signifies the disintegration of Yiddish, estranging the language from its speakers and, implicitly, its readers. In an ultimate, “polytonal” rhetoric of unmaking, Yiddish in Shmuglars, like so many avant-garde productions and performances in other languages and media from the same era, must go into exile from the culture that it had given voice to, and this process reflects other dislocations that the novel represents.
Abstract During the eighteenth century a series of notations emerged around which the language of the novel was restructured. The never-ending blocks of justified text (so characteristic of the first novels) were replaced by pages chiseled with chapter numbers and paragraphs, quotation marks and indented dashes. Here, for the first time, the prose of the novel was worked into a unique spatial form. This article explores how these notational innovations modified our earlier oral patterns of thought, changing in turn our ability to imagine voices and the passage of time.
Abstract This essay argues that the body-mind projected by lyric reading is modeled on neurodivergence but not acknowledged as such. The idealized kinesthesia of movement disorders abstracts from disability to anthropomorphize poetry’s antinormative or “stretched” language. Tourette’s syndrome, in particular, cannot ground a coherent aesthetic will for lyric; indeed, Oliver Sacks must turn to the latter, via Nietzsche, to imagine his patients’ mastery of the disorder in the form of “kinetic melodies.” Drawing from disability studies’ critiques of cognitive models of autism, the essay suggests that the paradoxical volition and form of Tourette’s destabilizes cognitive studies of poetry. At the same time, Tourette’s reveals how historical prosody, especially metrical versification, came to appear more pathologically “ticcy.” This transformation ironically limited poetry’s accessibility for those neurodivergent subjects that poets and critics sublimely encountered as new aesthetic potential.
Abstract Canonicity is central to literary studies. Even if scholars are not explicitly concerned with it, canonicity shapes their selection of texts and authors—and that, in turn, may reinforce the latter’s canonicity. In recent years, several articles, especially in the field of computational literary studies, have sought to make canonicity visible by reconstructing it empirically. However, the theoretical basis of these works is often rather vague. This article aims to bridge this theoretical gap. The authors propose an explication of the central concept of canonicity and relate it to the notions of canon and canonization. They then outline different strategies for reconstructing canonicity, discuss the systematic aspects that need to be considered, and propose ways to evaluate such reconstructions. Their framework is intended to help contextualize existing work and, more importantly, to provide theoretical guidance for future efforts to reconstruct canonicity.
Applying cognitive metaphor theory to a reading of Franz Kafka's first great story "The Judgment" fills a lacuna in the long tradition of scholarship on the role of metaphor in Kafka's work. Cognitive analysis of the text reveals a liberal and effective use of everyday basic linguistic metaphor on the part of the narrator alongside a striking discrepancy in metaphorical facility between the story's two protagonists, findings with important implications. Further, each critical juncture of the narrative - the turning point, the climax, and the denouement - foregrounds metaphor in unique and fascinating ways. In light of the text's genesis - composed over the course of eight hours one night in September 1912 - these findings indicate, contra received wisdom that the author had an "aversion" to metaphor, an intuitive appreciation of the power and truth of metaphor as elucidated by contemporary cognitive science.
This article challenges the current discourse on the personal and social benefits of reading fiction by analyzing the representation and use of social mind reading in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Though the novel is closely associated with literary criticism on improved Theory of Mind, and contains a clear moral message about the importance of careful interpretation of others' behavior, the style of character description in the early part of the novel reinforces biases in readers' social cognition that have the potential for negative social impact. The article uses research from social psychology and social neuroscience to support this argument, concluding that literary critics need to take seriously the possibility that reading fiction may have negative effects on readers' social cognition.
This essay sketches a historical poetics of the elegy by tracking its formal metamorphoses from its archaic Greek and Roman origins to the German philosophical elegy and its modern Anglophone afterlives. Against dominant interpretations that define elegy exclusively by its content as a poetry of death, the essay emphasizes the dialectical tension between the elegy's particular poetic form and that content. Through readings of Mimnermus, Catullus, Goethe, and H & ouml;lderlin alongside more recent poets such as Mary Jo Bang, Larry Levis, and T. R. Hummer, the essay argues that elegy's asymmetrical meter and monodic voice figure the irresolution between mourning and the elliptical persistence of its presentation. Ultimately, by reading the broader history of the elegy, the essay suggests that rather than solely commemorating a private loss, the elegiac mode can be seen as a form of history itself.
After the global onset of the COVID- 19 pandemic in 2020, stories about virus outbreaks have enjoyed newfound popularity. Meanwhile, the lived experience of a pandemic has profoundly altered how pandemic stories are told in postCOVID- 19 fiction, as well as assumptions and expectations about what makes such stories tellable. While pandemic narratives written before 2020 usually explore speculative "what if?" scenarios, more recent ones tend to lean toward more grounded reflections, or "what now?" propositions. This essay explores this shift via a compar(2022). The former involves a speculative scenario about an apocalyptic pandemic, whereas the latter appeals heavily to the reader's experience of COVID- 19 to make its depiction of a fictional pandemic feel authentic and compelling. Comparison of these two pandemic novels enables a timely amendment to the theory of narrative experientiality, influentially advanced by Marco Caracciolo. This essay introduces a distinction between speculative and grounded narratives, integrating the notion of experientiality with rhetorical narrative theory to reveal how fiction can appeal to both readers' lived experiences and genuine novelty for its tellability and relevance.
The inability to describe traumatic events is a central aspect of the expe-rience of trauma itself, a breakdown in the link between experience and words that eats away at the rhythm of everyday life. Reading contemporary poetry written by war veterans can offer a possible way out of the traumatic paradox via a new poetic category, an indexical poetics that highlights the traumatic event not through the frustrating attempt to depict it but through the indexical function of pointing-to . In charging seemingly benign indexical words - it , me , then, and so on - with the force of an unspoken personal catastrophe, these poems manage to point to a traumatic event as well as mark the way it had undermined the meaning of words. The poetic result charts a diagram of a new way of speaking and writing, a new economy of meaning that, like any diagram, creates a world of expression that is inextricably tied to the pull of a very real painful past.
Are literary characters as real as human beings? The mimetic quality of fictional characters has been debated in literary studies for decades, but theories in favor of their reality-imitating nature and those arguing that they are mere textual signs have never reconciled their differences. Using cognitive narratology as its theoretical framework, this article reevaluates both positions and proposes that whether readers perceive literary characters as real or artificial entities depends on their state of mind. It further argues that fictional characters can share, for at least some of the time, a cognitive space with real-world entities. This position elevates them, cognitively speaking, to the same level of existence in the readers' mind. Through the exploration of these arguments, this article finds common ground between traditionally opposed mimetic and analytical theories, allowing both positions to coexist while also opening up the field for new lines of inquiry.
A recent outgrowth in the burgeoning area of cognitive studies in the arts is the sub-field of empirical aesthetics. Leading research in this area tracks physical responses to the mechanisms of art and the emotions such devices elicit. In so doing, an empirical aesthetics seeks a genuinely situated psychology of artistic experience. This essay tests the design, terms, and verdicts of key studies in empirical aesthetics. It suggests that they veer into parascience by conceiving the arts primarily as sensuous stimuli and by excluding intention and subjectivity from their trials, instead of recognizing them as integral components of artistic creation and aesthetic judgment.
This article explores Virginia Woolf's and Clarice Lispector's bold modernist challenge to the twentieth- century assumption that sustained attention is the sole legitimate mode of reading. In scenes of reading from To the Lighthouse and Near to the Wild Heart, and in their essays, Woolf and Lispector expose and contest the gendered assumptions underpinning hierarchies of readerly value. Their male characters project onto women forms of textual engagement marked by sensory perception, fluidity, and dream- like reverie, while claiming for themselves an "attentive" reading mode associated with intellectual mastery and militaristic control. Yet these fictional worlds dramatize how such so- called distracted modes can yield intellectual force, embodied ways of knowing, and subtle means of resistance to gendered systems of power. The article situates these literary strategies within broader twentieth- century debates on attention, productivity, and the methods of literary studies. Against this backdrop, Woolf and Lispector stage an incisive critique of the presumed neutrality of close or attentive reading, showing how value hierarchies around readerly cognitive modes are structured by social and gendered power. Rather than reinforcing the attention- distraction binary, Woolf's and Lispector's works foreground the capacity to move between readerly modes and experiment with embodied distraction as generative sites of aesthetic and political possibility.
Anna Burns's 2018 Man Booker prize winner, Milkman, depicts a young woman whose community labels her "beyond the pale" because of her predilection for reading-while-walking. She asks a friend: "Are you saying it's okay for [Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" Her friend replies, "Semtex isn't unusual. . . . It fits in - more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in." The retort suggests that, within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, inattention is more offensive to local sensibilities than bomb making. The passage offers two insights that will be central to this article. First, the attention of human subjects is always under scrutiny; it is policed and regulated by the communities and groups with which individuals are affiliated. Second, attention is often the tool that allows the subject to escape the limitations and punishments that such communities enforce. This article addresses the literary, social, and psychological expressions of attention and the ways in which they are dynamically interconnected in the representation of the tensions between national and personal trauma.
The article proposes a theory of what it calls "emersivity," or the permanence of fictional characters in readers' lives once they have finished reading books. Reflecting on empirical data from a study of four hundred readers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the article provides a model and a theoretical framework to account for readers' reporting how fictional characters "stay with them" after readerly immersion (i.e., "experiential crossing"). To date, cognitive literary theories of immersion have focused exclusively on the other direction of transit: namely, how our real past experiences can sustain or enhance our experience of a literary narrative. By contrast, how fictional elements from a storyworld can surface or transmigrate into real- life cognition has been basically ignored. The emersivity of fictional characters is intriguing and complex because it raises important issues regarding the possibility of entertaining in the real world intersubjective relations with non- actual beings, or what the article calls phantasmal intersubjectivity. The article concludes by claiming that the emersivity of literary characters can provide further empirical and theoretical ground to support claims about the impact of literary narratives in everyday life. It also argues for the relevance of emersivity to the broader study of permeability between imaginative and real worlds in human consciousness.
