Faculty Presenter:

Moira Weigel 
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Faculty Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Title: Prompting Comparison: What is World Literature in the Age of Generative AI?

Over the past few years, it has become commonplace to hear that AI is transforming the world. But what does the advent of large language models mean for the field of world literature? Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, have “read” more literature, in more languages, than any human being ever will. But their capacities for comparison are limited. Their training data has given them implicit frameworks and theories drawn from these texts available on the internet. And their architecture is based on a probabilistic theory of meaning very different from the philosophies of language that have traditionally guided literary study. Teaching cultural objects and traditions always involves implicit choices and frameworks. We know from centuries of philological and literary study that these choices involve questions of power. When we deal with human teachers or critics, we can investigate the contexts and institutions that shape them. When we confront foundation models, however, we find that they are black boxed. How can we interrogate a critic or teacher we can’t see?

The question is urgent at a moment when the tech industry is promoting LLMs as pedagogical support tools for both formal and informal learning all over the world–and LLMs are being taken up rapidly in “underresourced” linguistic communities where they least likely to perform well. In this talk, I will share findings from an experiment that I conducted over the summer, with the goal of illuminating the ontologies and epistemologies that guide the comparatist in the black box of ChatGPT. Specifically, I will present a provisional theory of how ChatGPT understands world literature, based on querying it about global receptions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And I will propose a method of expert prompting that scholars knowledgeable about diverse language traditions might use to analyze and contest LLMs perspectives as multilingual “writing machines.”

Graduate Student Respondent: 

Hannah Stone, PhD Student in Comparative Literature

***

Graduate Student Presenter: 

Matilde Morales, PhD Student in Comparative Literature

Title: Mayakovsky as Such: Lily Brik, the Letterpress, and the Lesenka

This talk considers the evolution of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s layout and versification techniques, culminating in his introduction of the lesenka in the 1923 long lyric poem Pro eto (About That), which was dedicated to his longtime muse Lily Brik. The adoption of the lesenka was a negotiation between the artist’s search for his own style and the ease of legibility, reproducibility, and dissemination granted by the letterpress.

Faculty Respondent: 

Justin Weir

Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature, Affiliate of the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies

Event open to all. Refreshments will be served.

Zoom Details [HUID needed]