We call them “large language models,” but generative AI applications like ChatGPT are built on models of text—statistical systems trained not on speech or thought but on the written record of human culture. That distinction matters, because literary theory has long been concerned with how texts produce meaning, and therefore literary theory offers a dense repository of conceptual frameworks for understanding how and why such models work as well as they do. At the same time, the extraordinary and unprecedented success of textual computing suggests a need to reconsider those frameworks in the light of generative AI.
Michael Gavin's talk will trace new genealogies for three key terms: meaning, context, and structure. Thinkers such as Saussure, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Kristeva, Derrida, and Lévi-Strauss described the relational systems through which language produces significance; today, those same intuitions reappear as computational architectures and embedding spaces. By reading contemporary AI through their legacy, we can see recurrent neural networks and transformers not as an alien intelligence but as a continuation of our collective theoretical imagination—an instrument that materializes, in code and data, the very structural and contextual logics that modern literary theory first set out to describe.
Professor Gavin is a digital humanist whose research explores the intersection of linguistics, computation, and cultural theory. He is Associate Faculty at the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies and an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His work combines historical interpretation with computational methods to study how language, culture, and information systems evolve across time. Gavin is the author of Literary Mathematics (Stanford UP, 2023) and The Invention of English Criticism (Cambridge UP, 2015) and co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2026). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Language, Leonardo, New Literary History, English Literary History, Review of English Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the International Journal of GIS. Trained as a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, Gavin is a graduate of The Ohio State University (B.A. 1999, M.A. 2005) and Rutgers University (Ph.D. 2010).
Co-sponsored with Global Arts + Humanities