Among the formal qualities of the text important to literary study, style has become the most central. And yet, style has also proven surprisingly tractable to the large language models at the heart of AI platforms. In this course, we will study how style assumed its importance and how to assess it computationally and critically. Through a series of experiments with large language models, we will put pressure on what it is and what it means to literary theory today.
4-5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
Among the formal qualities of the text important to literary study, style has become the most central. And yet, style has also proven surprisingly tractable to the large language models at the heart of AI platforms. In this course, we will study how style assumed its importance and how to assess it computationally and critically. Through a series of experiments with large language models, we will put pressure on what it is and what it means to literary theory today.