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The Automatic Muse

the Automatic Muse Nicholas Carr: 2021 blog post, now inlcude and updated in chapter 8, “Machines Who Speak,” of Carr’s 2025 book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. In the fall of 1917, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, now in middle age and having twice had marriage proposals turned down, first by […]

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In Defense of Literacy

Wendell Berry In a country in which everybody goes to school, it may seem absurd to offer a defense of literacy, and yet I believe that such a defense is in order, and that the absurdity lies not in the defense, but in the necessity for it. The published illiteracies of the certified educated are […]

Posted in ENG 101 | 8 Comments »

ChatGPT is Dumber Than You Think

“ChatGPT is Dumber Than You Think: Treat it like a toy, not a tool” Ian Bogost The Atlantic. December 7, 2022. As a critic of technology, I must say that the enthusiasm for ChatGPT, a large-language model trained by OpenAI, is misplaced. Although it may be impressive from a technical standpoint, the idea of relying […]

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Hypertext Literature

Caitrin Doyle Final Writing Project May 8th, 2014 Part I: Hypertext Literature’s Influence on the Modern World         Technology has been causing a shift in the way that people process information and deduce meaning from everything, especially when it comes to literature. Many, like outraged author Sven Birkerts of “The Gutenberg Elegies”, are concerned that the […]

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The Trouble with Wilderness

The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature by William Cronon (William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90;
links to printer-friendly texts available at bottom of this page) http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html   The time has come to rethink wilderness. This will seem […]

Posted in Ecocriticism | 6 Comments »

Self-Reliance

“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) “Ne te quaesiveris extra.” “Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that […]

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Quotation and Originality

“Quotation and Originality” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1876) WHOEVER looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see […]

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Essay as Hack

Ander Monson, “Essay as Hack” http://otherelectricities.com/swarm/essayashack.html     I fear for the essay, friends, and its bad reputation. It feels white and dull, dusty, old. Encased in tombs like the Oxford Book of the Essay.Each year’s Best American is not a yawn, exactly, since some of the individual essays are good enough when read and thought about, but […]

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Is Google Making us Stupid?

“Is Google Making us Stupid?: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” [this is the link to the original publication. Nicholas Carr [Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008] “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous […]

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Hidden Intellectualism

Hidden Intellectualism Pedagogy 1.1 (2001) 21-36 Gerald Graff   In an arresting memoir “of a Pentecostal boyhood” that appeared in 1993 in the Voice Literary Supplement, Michael Warner describes his improbable journey from an upbringing in a Christian Pentecostal family and graduation from Oral Roberts University to his current identity as a “queer atheist intellectual.” It is […]

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