Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

Are writing students nowadays just wasting their time? Are writing teachers running out of time? The advent of AI-driven Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Chat GPT seems to spell the obsolescence of the university writing class. The skills you would traditionally learn in a course like this one appear under imminent threat of becoming devalued and outmoded. Technology companies have aggressively shifted from speculating on cryptocurrencies and “the Metaverse” to betting on the mass automation of intellectual labour, while recent union struggles like the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike have focused on beating back the deskilling and debasement of such work. But will academic and creative writers soon go the way of phone operators and lighthouse keepers, typesetters and telegraphers, grain threshers and handloom weavers? Is the automation of writing historically inevitable, ethically desirable, politically feasible, or actually even possible? In this course, you will still learn the craft of academic writing, but we will also explore what it means to learn and practice a craft under the pressure of its looming automation. We’ll focus on three feelings often provoked by such pressure: ridicule, unease, and outrage. Through analyzing some of the earliest imaginings of automated writing, including an eighteenth-century algorithm for writing bad poetry, we’ll consider perhaps the most common response to the threat of being replaced by a machine: ridiculing its inhuman mistakes and shoddy performance. We’ll then take up the question of what exactly constitutes “the human touch” by probing the next common response, when the anxious laughter dies away and a chill sense of unease seeps in as you watch the machine’s all-too-convincing performance. Here, alongside classic essays on the uncanny and the mechanical reproduction of art, we’ll analyze a Romantic-era gothic tale of robot body-horror and a contemporary AI-generated meditation on mourning. Lastly, we’ll explore the feeling of outrage animating political opposition to capitalist automation, moving from accounts of “Luddite” machine-breakers in early nineteenth-century England to Marxist critiques of mechanization as a means of more intensive exploitation and of today’s “automation discourse” as an ideological smokescreen for capitalism’s long-term stagnation. Throughout this course, you will also be creatively using LLMs in your writing activities, mostly by way of negative example. (That’s right: Chat GPT is allowed, though only in limited ways.) Your first major project will ask you to hone your editing skills on a series of AI-generated essays in order to compose a short “how-not-to” guide to academic essay-writing. You will then use your guide to curate an entry for a “best worst” AI-generated essay contest. Your second major project will ask you to develop an essay prompt on a topic related to automation that cannot be answered by an LLM; you will then draft, workshop, redraft, and revise this essay over the last four weeks. Shorter semi-automatic activities scaffolded throughout the course will also help you develop your own personal writing voice and your skills of passage analysis, critical paraphrase, and paragraph construction. The course will culminate with a symposium where you will present the final version of your essay to your human colleagues.

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills