Hark. The end is nigh. “In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the factory-line worker,” writes Dennis Yi Tenen near the start of Literary Theory for Robots. “Today, it has come for the writer, the professor, the physician, the programmer and the attorney.” Like the end-of-the-planet movies that pelted the multiplexes at the turn of the millennium, newspapers and – increasingly – bookshops are awash with economists, futurologists and social semioticians talking up, down and about artificial intelligence. Even Henry Kissinger, in The Age of AI (2021), spoke of “epoch-making transformations” and an imminent “revolution in human affairs”.
Tenen, a tenured professor of English at New York’s Columbia University, isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as he initially makes out. His is an oddly titled book – do robots need literary theory? Are we the robots? – that has little in common with the techno-theory of writers such as Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles. For the most part, it’s a call for rhetorical de-escalation. Relax, he says, machines and literature go back a long way; his goal is to reconstruct “the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history” using “strings of anecdote and light philosophical commentary”.
