Prompting Comparison: Technological Horizons of Poetics Today
Description
This seminar examines—and contextualizes—how large language models (LLMs) are transforming the acts of reading, interpreting, and imagining that have long defined literature and literary theory. We will approach our topic through two interrelated lines of inquiry.
First, we ask how the literary imagination—as an episteme—might expand from embodied to machinic, from cognitive to distributed. By revisiting the cognitive and neuroscientific foundations of metaphor, narrative, reading, and creative thought, alongside phenomenologies and cross-linguistic histories of imagination, we will explore new ways of thinking about creativity, metaphor, and world-construction in the human mind and beyond.
Second, we will turn to the concept of world literature as a lens for understanding the ontologies and epistemologies of LLMs themselves. Generative models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek have “read” more literature, in more languages, than any human ever will, and these models constantly compare texts, even if their methods for doing so remain opaque. We know from centuries of literary study that comparison is never neutral—it always involves choices and relations of power. What strategies of prompting and reading might illuminate the comparatist within the black box?
By bringing these two sets of questions together, the seminar initiates a conversation about how the convergence of cognition and computation are reshaping reading, interpretation, and creativity in a multilingual or global context. At the same time, we will foreground the value of literary approaches to critically studying technology. By insisting that LLMs are neither benign nor unprecedented, we will collectively experiment in producing engaged scholarship that resists the imperatives of industry-led hype.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sayed Elsisi is an assistant professor of Arabic at George Mason University (US), with a specialization in the domains of Arabic literature, culture, and cinema. Prior to his current position, he taught at Harvard University, University of Maryland, and The American University of Cairo. His recent research is a monograph that delves into an innovative interpretation of the Arabian Nights.
Speaker Bio
Sasha McDowell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative and World Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she studies French, Russian, and Spanish literature and film. Presently, she is working on a dissertation which examines the function of violence, fragmentation, and affect in the film scenarios of Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Federico García Lorca.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Eder is a literary scholar, he heads the Department of Corporate Identity and Communication Design at the Federal Chancellery of Austria and teaches at the Department for German Studies at the University of Vienna. His research interests include the literature of the postwar-avantgarde, the relation between epistemology and literature, and Cognitive Poetics.
Oswald Wiener's Theory of Thought. Conversations and Essays on Fundamental Issues in Cognitive Science, Berlin: De Gruyter 2023
Speaker Bio
I am an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, where I teach media theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Common across all my work is an historicized attempt to chart the dynamics between media, language, and consciousness. My most recent publication, "Platform Poetics", co-authored with Zak Bronson, appears in Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram (Bloomsbury 2024), the first edited collection of its kind.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Anne Dymek is a Lecturer in German Studies and in the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard University. She holds PhDs in Film Philosophy (Sorbonne, 2013) and German Literature (Harvard, 2022). Her research explores the intersections of language, imagination, and cognition. She has published and taught on philosophy, film, literary theory, and the neuroscience of language, and is currently developing a book on the future of the literary imagination in the age of artificial intelligence.
Speaker Bio
Julie Beth Napolin is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at The New School. She is the author of The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020; shortlisted Memory Studies Association First Book Award, 2021) and co-editor of The Faulkner Journal. She is also a musician and released a solo LP on Silver Current titled Only the Void Stands Between Us (2024). She is working on a book on GenAI titled "Stay with Me."
Speaker Bio
I am an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University and a Managing Editor of the Journal of World Literature. I earned my PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2024, working in English, German, French, and Spanish (in addition to Turkish). My research focuses on world literature and metaphysics of fiction, with a particular emphasis on the modern English and German novel. I also work in the fields of translation studies and digital humanities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Claire Solomon is the author of scholarship and fiction on a range of topics: upsetting musical comedies, yoga as world literature, literary prostitutes, crows, anarchist heroines, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, new music, translation theory, the first female balloonist, and a college that gets overly excited about AI. She is a professor of Hispanic studies and comparative literature at Oberlin College.
Speaker Bio
Rachel Wong is currently a C.H. Beck Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Marbach Archive of German Literature. Her first book project, After Schiller, explores the paradoxes of aesthetic autonomy and political engagement in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Adorno, and Marcuse, an excerpt from which is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity. A second project, Mass Ornaments, will consider the Orientalist prehistory and Asian-German afterlives of Siegfried Kracauer’s celebrated theory of the crowd.
Speaker Bio
Junjie Luo is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and Director of the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World, with essays appearing in Comparative Literature Studies and Perspectives. He teaches a data science class “Cultural Analytics” and serves on the Modern Language Association Task Force on World Languages and Generative AI. His current research explores teaching with GenAI.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Fried is Professor of classical Chinese at the University of Alberta, and chair of the Department of East Asian Studies; his research focuses on comparative approaches to medieval Chinese understandings of language and communication. He is a past president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature, co-editor of Routledge Studies in Comparative Chinese Literature and Culture, and an executive committee member for the MLA's Association of Language Departments.