Mechanical Muse: Writing Technologies Be

Each new writing technology has produced its own fantasies and fears. Plato had Socrates warn that the alphabet would ruin memory; Nietzsche, half-blind at a typewriter, noticed that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”; the Surrealists tried to write without an author; and the language model now produces fluent prose with no one behind it. This course reads that history backward and forward. We move from the alphabet and the golem’s animating letter, through the copyist’s pen around 1800 and the typewriter, phonograph, and Parlograph around 1900, to automatic writing, the card index, the computer, and generative AI: What does the apparatus do to the writer and to writing? And which imaginaries accompanied the introduction of new writing technologies? Along the way, we ask who has been imagined at the machine (the Muse, the copyist, the medium, the typist, the cyborg) and what each figure reveals about the fantasies attached to writing.

The course is organized around two theoretical frameworks. The first treats technology as an a priori of writing: in Friedrich Kittler’s account, “media determine our situation,” and the instrument conditions what can be written, and even thought, before any writer sets to work. The second, Rüdiger Campe’s “scene of writing,” treats writing as an ensemble of language, instrument, and the gestures of the writing body, whose friction literature often stages. Much of our discussion will test one framework against the other: Does the apparatus determine what is written, or is it one element among others in the scene of writing?

You will also write in four genres, each with its own purpose: the reading journal (collecting and annotating), the scene-of-writing commentary (close reading of a single scene), the analytical essay (based on the reading journal but making an argument and developing a specific topic), and the co-writing experiment with a reflective essay (writing with AI, then thinking about what it did). Each genre builds on the one before. For each assignment you will receive a prompt and a rubric. Learning to write in these genres is part of the course.

Readings and lectures in English. No prerequisites.