{"title":"Military Technologies and Human Labor","authors":"J. Schnepf","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10575134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575134","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43576126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"All the Microworld’s a Stage: Realism in Interactive Fiction and Artificial Intelligence","authors":"Evan Donahue","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10575049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575049","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Early in the history of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a paradigm known as microworlds emerged in which researchers constructed computer simulations of aspects of the real world from which their nascent AI systems could learn. Although microworlds were ultimately abandoned, AI researchers have recently called for their return, this time borrowing explicitly from the literary genre of interactive fiction, whose forms and conventions they might use to represent the world in text for the purpose of teaching machines to speak. This confluence of literary form and scientific method invites a closer examination of the relationship between word and world in AI research. The author argues for a reading of microworlds research and of AI more broadly through the lens of literary realism and through the literary texts that comprise its data sets and from which researchers expect artificially intelligent machines to learn about the world. The question of what kind of knowledge literature represents lies at the heart of AI research and thus presents an opportunity for a deeper engagement between AI research and literary, game, and media studies.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46163306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cultural Gradients and the Sociotechnics of Data","authors":"T. Shoemaker","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10575190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47731483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry Will Not Optimize, or What Is Literature to AI?","authors":"Michele Elam","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10575077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575077","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48283613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Critical DREAMer Memoir: Educational Mobility and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship","authors":"Guadalupe Escobar","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10345351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10345351","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article takes up the figure of the DREAMer in the twenty-first-century Latinx memoir by the formerly undocumented to consider the coupling of the right to education with narratability. The author reads Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), Reyna Grande’s The Distance between Us (2012), and Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented (2015) as examples of the critical DREAMer memoir, foregrounding suppressed and subversive self-representation. Such self-fashionings are constrained by overachievement while still troubling the myth of meritocracy to determine deservingness of US citizenship. This trio of texts shows how school systems are mechanisms of coercive assimilation that reproduce a ranking regime wherein racial others are excluded or subordinated. Even as school environments can silence, they can also be safe havens for amplifying the human voice. The freedom of expression found in education marks a transformation of silence into advocacy. The present proliferation of critical DREAMer memoirs largely reflects a new shape of post-9/11 Latinx literature, as well as the subgenre of human rights and literature.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44415901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ann Petry and the Existential Phenomenology of Race","authors":"Shane Vogel","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10345435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10345435","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article locates Ann Petry’s work within a different literary tradition than social realism, placing her in counterpoint to the existential phenomenology of contemporaneous writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Examining a key sequence in her final novel, The Narrows (1953), the author shows how Petry’s work calls for and models a Black existentialist reading practice that is in productive tension with the prescriptive protocols of social protest literature—then and now—and invites us to read for choices within situations rather than determining environments or ontological foreclosures.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47313754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Handful of Syllables Thrown Back across the Water”: Dictée’s Aesthetic Legacy and Thai American Poetics","authors":"Jasmine An","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10345365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10345365","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article draws on the formal and aesthetic qualities of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a critical model for theorizing the transnational legacies of colonialism and empire embedded in the acts of language learning and as an opening for Asian American literary studies to engage with the previously understudied genre of Thai American and Thai poetry. Foregrounding aesthetics and unique, translingual poetic practices, the readings in this article explore rich connections between Dictée and two experimental collections of Thai and Thai American poetry: Padcha Tuntha-obas’s trespasses (2006) and Jai Arun Ravine’s แล้ว and then entwine (2011a). Thai American cultural production is uniquely situated to offer aesthetic insights into the history of US presence in Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century onward, which in Thailand took the form of allyship and soft power as Thailand’s formally uncolonized status obscured the violent codifications of gender, racial, and sexual norms to align with Western, imperial worldviews. The author argues that, just as Dictée marked a revolutionary period in Asian American literary studies as the field grappled with the role of poststructural theory, experimental literary forms, and transnational, decolonial politics in the United States and Asia, a more sustained engagement with Thai American and Thai poetry can offer a critical entry point to address US informal empire building in Southeast Asia, including activities often occluded in mainstream historical narratives by a singular focus on Vietnam during the Cold War era.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48918979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Parasitical Trick: Mediating Dispossession in Early America","authors":"E. Plaue","doi":"10.1215/00029831-10345379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10345379","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? This article addresses these questions in the historical context of early American settler colonialism and demonstrates the relational structure that colonial legitimation requires, including how this structure is mediated by subjects not strictly part of that relation. Through readings of John Marshall, Mary Rowlandson, James Printer, and Martin R. Delany, this article brings together the fields of media philosophy and settler colonial studies to theorize the “parasitical trick” as a fundamental and flexible technique of settler colonialism that removes Indigenous people from relationality by, paradoxically, making them central to it.","PeriodicalId":45756,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47018657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}