Department of English

• Monday, April 7, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We welcome Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) for a talk titled: “Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I.”

Professor Turnovsky writes:

Whether exuberant or doomsaying, the polemics surrounding AI share an interest in representing it as breaking with, rather than exhibiting continuities with, the past. Yet AI’s rootedness in preexisting technologies defines its impacts as much as its newness. These preexisting technologies include not only recent advances in mass digitization and machine learning but analog developments going back centuries and even millennia. The reality is that AI is inhabited by the technologies of the predigital era, which continue to shape online experiences. Among these are two technologies that emerged within early print; namely, characters, understood as both textual figurations of humans and letterforms streamlined through typecasting. My talk explores both and their interrelation, partly in the phenomenon of printed letters that offer experiences of unmediated contact with the human via the translation of scribal into typographic writing. The hope is to offer more nuanced historical context for understanding the impacts of the digital today.

Geoffrey Turnovsky is Professor of French and co-director of the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington, overseeing the graduate certificate in Textual and Digital Studies and the minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. He is the author of The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 2024).