Real and Imagined
Asynchronous Session
Artificial Literature: Notes on the Future of Literary Creation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alejandro Rossi
This paper explores the relationship between literary creation and the emerging generative AI technologies by analyzing works of fiction produced through these types of technologies over the last five years. This reveals how AI is increasingly influencing fiction writing, making it necessary to review our traditional ideas on originality, authorship, and intellectual property. The implications of the study are twofold: first, it highlights the beginning of a new paradigm in our global culture as AI becomes more intertwined with creative processes. Second, it raises ethical and philosophical questions regarding the collaboration between humans and intelligent machines in the creation of the arts. This allows us to establish that we can currently use the term "artificial literature" to describe this type of literary creation, which has the potential to create a common ground between researchers in both the Humanities and the Sciences.
“Morbid Melancholy, and Hereditary Ill-Health”: Gothic Europe in Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirsten Møllegaard
More than any other geographical imaginary, gothic Europe looms large in American writer Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction. Although Poe (1809-1849) never set foot in continental Europe, several of his most prominent stories take place in European cities and landscapes. While clearly linked in theme and motifs to the works of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, Poe's imaginary Europe is steeped in centuries-long traditions of dark exoticism and sophisticated grotesqueries ranging from murderous family feuds ("Metzengerstein"), aristocratic decadence ("Ligeia"), torture and oppression ("The Pit and the Pendulum"), plagues and carnivals ("The Mask of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado") to the labyrinthine cityscapes of the Dupin murder mysteries set in Paris. As a counter-image to antebellum USA and the pronounced anti-European strain in American letters of that time, Poe's gothic Europe harbors combustible energies rooted in deep histories. Where other American writers celebrated the newness and democratic foundation of their nation, Poe explored imaginary, multilingual Europe as a place where esoteric knowledge and aristocratic power produce madness, “morbid melancholy, and hereditary ill-health” (Poe "Metzengerstein" 87). This paper focuses on the way Poe positions continental Europe epistemologically on a history-saturated knowledge/power continuum that challenges the anti-historical nature-veneration of American romanticism.
