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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character

Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character

Ward, Megan

Paperback

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

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ISBN10: 081425487X
ISBN13: 9780814254875
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Jan 3 2022
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Offers a new theory of realist character through character's unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine.

In Seeming Human, Megan Ward contends that mid-twentieth-century versions of artificial intelligence (AI) offer a theory of verisimilitude omitted by traditional histories of character, which often focus on the development of interiority and the shift from flat to round characters in the Victorian era. Instead, by reading character through AI, Megan Ward's Seeming Human argues that routinization, predictability, automation, and even flatness are all features of realist characters.

Early artificial intelligence movements such as cybernetics, information theory, and the Turing test define ways of seeming--rather than being--human. Using these theories of verisimilitude to read Victorian novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, Seeming Human argues that mechanicity has been perceived as anti-realist because it is the element that we least want to identify as human. Because AI produces human-like intelligence, it makes clear that we must actually turn to machines in order to understand what makes realist characters seem so human.

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