Texas Tech University

Upcoming Events

 

Mar
7

Value/Values Speakers Series:

Dr. Nan Z Da
(Johns Hopkins University)

“On Real and Artificial Intelligence”

This talk poses the central question of language-based, large-data artificial intelligence in literary-critical terms: can you find solutions in empiricism for what cannot be had in comprehension? The latest innovations in this area of artificial intelligence such as the wider application of a neural-net-based attention mechanism to areas as different as corporate and legal "moral reasoning" and "entailment," on the one hand, and aural and graphic recognition software, on the other, allow us to pose the question with more precision and a better sense of real and artificial overlaps. As it turns out, and as Jeffrey Binder and Ted Chiang have recently demonstrated, much that was previously seen as ineffable and elusive can be pattern-detected with somewhat acceptable margins of error; what is harder to replicate is what we might call "important sequence of information that matters to someone." This caveat increasingly matters as more disparate things are rounded up and treated as language models-- i.e. how to predict what x is, given n before it, with internal tests for statistical soundness. These new applications reveal the underlying mechanical workarounds in this kind of intelligence, workarounds which join up with existential questions in literary criticism: "what part of literature is empirically available?"; "what are the benchmark for inferential soundness and what beliefs guarantee them?"; "how much information can really be contained in forms and motifs of language and culture?"; and, finally, "as one processes information in writing where is not just error, but wronging, introduced?"

Nan Z Da 笪章难 is an associate professor in the Department of English. She taught at the University of Notre Dame in the departments of English and East Asian Language and Literatures for nine years before moving to Johns Hopkins. 

Da's teaching and scholarship cover nineteenth-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and the data sciences. Her book, Intransitive Encounters (Columbia University Press 2018), asks about literary-cultural interactions that do not lead to synthesis, reflecting both phenomenological reality and various predicaments of global modernity.  Her other published works discuss the mechanisms of disambiguation, literature and complexity, parrhesia and literary criticism, and contemporary Chinese history.

She has taught courses on Transcendentalism and its aftermaths, discourses of China, literature and social theory, as well as traditional survey courses on pre-1850 American literature, world literature, and comparative methodologies. Courses taught at Johns Hopkins will include "Literary Studies as Data Science" and "Nineteenth-Century American Literature.”

With Professor Anahid Nersessian she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press

Join us at 7:30pm at Human Sciences 169.

Mar
27

Yours, Mine, and Ours

A workshop with scholar-in-residence Dr. Adriel Trott

To be attuned to and appreciative of difference and inequality invites concern for recognizing and appreciating what belongs to others. Replacing appropriation with appreciation requires seeing how marginalized cultures and identities are taken up with a pseudoappreciation in the service of the hegemonic culture with little concern for elevating those from whom the appropriation is drawn. For some, the concept of appropriation operates through a fraught notion of ownership that depends on viewing creative work as commodities to which value is attached and through which value circulates. Much of the creative projects of art, music and literature depend on influence and an appreciative referential style drawing on the work of others. Language itself one might say draws on words one did not form to speak. Metaphor functions by moving between one thing to what is other than it in a way that moves from what belongs to one thing to what belongs to another. This workshop will consider questions around the extent to which taking up what is other functions as appropriation especially in metaphor.

Wednesday, March 27, at 4pm. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Loraux, Brill, LaRocque.

Learn more here or register now.

Apr
17

Community, Land, People

A workshop with scholar-in-residence Dr. Adriel Trott

 

Community is good for human beings. We flourish and grow and become who we are through organized engagement with others. When we think of community and political life, we tend to think of a specific group with particular practices and institutions defined in distinction to other groups. The problem with that approach is that it invariably leaves some people on the outside, and in fact, many of the ways human beings have historically construed community -- shared land, shared blood, shared parentage – function to exclude. In the service of considering that it could be possible to think community that refuses to distinguish between those who are valued and those are not, this workshop will interrogate the status and limits of the notion of “a people” as a given or natural community and the notion of land as the ground for community.  By “a people” we refer to a group with a shared history, culture, and language. This can be liberatory, especially in efforts to resist how being so construed has produced inequity, but it might also introduce restrictive and essentializing patterns. “Land” can refer to territory, property, but also to the life-giving capacities of nature, of the earth itself, which sustains all human existence. This workshop will consider issues surrounding the ways that various ways of conceiving of “a people” and “land” contribute to sharing value or to dividing between the valued and the unvalued.


Wednesday, April 17, at 4pm. Readings from Sharma, Balibar, Locke, Betasamosake Simpson

Learn more here or register now.