Writing Machines and Machinic Literature

At a moment when ChatGPT is transforming our relationship to writing, this class explores the place of the machine in the history of literature as fear, fantasy, and creative function: from literary representations of writing machines to automated textual production. Contemporary anxieties about machines usurping creativity will be shown to have ancient origins. We will move from Plato’s suspicion of inscription to Annie Dorsen’s AI-generated productions of Hamlet, via a survey of twentieth-century avant-garde attempts to write like a machine, from Modernist automatic writing and Dadaist cut-ups to postmodern hypertext. We will cover movements including Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Fluxus, and Oulipo, reading works by Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Italo Calvino, John Cage, Alison Knowles, David Foster Wallace, and more. We will also read texts written by machines, including RACTER, ELIZA, PARRY and Claude. As well as reading, we will be playing early video games, chatting to some of the first chatbots, viewing machinic artworks, and listening to constraint-driven music. This class will widen our knowledge and critical faculties as readers, but also as writers: we will experiment with automatic writing, use games and constraints to generate text, and reflect on collaborating with writing machines.

There are no prerequisites for this course.