Description: The notion of artificial intelligence implies its obverse and improbable quality: something like “natural” intelligence. In his talk, Dennis Tenen will show that intelligence in the wild almost always entails artifice.  He will examine the role artifice plays in cognition, and specifically in the cognitive tasks related to textual authorship. This change of perspective leads us to reexamine the history of literature from the standpoint of authorial technique, while also bearing important consequences for our own contemporary academic practices of writing and research.

Bio: Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he also directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab. His recent publications include Literary Theory for Robots (Norton, 2024). He lives, writes, and codes in New York City.