UN3462: Mechanical Muse | O. Simons

English and Comparative Literature and Germanic Languages
Undergraduate Seminar
Tu Th 10:10-11:25AM

Each new writing technology has produced its own fantasies and fears. Plato had Socrates warn that the alphabet would ruin memory; Nietzsche, half-blind at a typewriter, noticed that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”; the Surrealists tried to write without an author; and the language model now produces fluent prose with no one behind it. This course reads that history backward and forward. We move from the alphabet and the golem’s animating letter, through the copyist’s pen around 1800 and the typewriter, phonograph, and Parlograph around 1900, to automatic writing, the card index, the computer, and generative AI: What does the apparatus do to the writer and to writing? And which imaginaries accompanied the introduction of new writing technologies? Along the way, we ask who has been imagined at the machine (the Muse, the copyist, the medium, the typist, the cyborg) and what each figure reveals about the fantasies attached to writing.

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