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.
