Literary Theory for Robots

Dennis Yi Tenen’s Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this talk, we will discuss the past and future of literary technologies: the necessity of research into the material conditions of textual production, and the surprising afterlife of Structuralist thought. A case study from the book will conclude the conversation.

The respondent will be Digital Humanities Strategist Grant Wythoff.

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media. His research happens at the intersection of people, text, and technology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.

Sponsored by the Program in Media + Modernity. Co-sponsored by the CDH.