Logic, Modern Literature and Artificial Intelligence
Logic, Modern Literature and Artificial Intelligence
Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
Examining the relationship between these fields for the first time, this book explores a series of surprising affinities between symbolic logic, literature, and AI, from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
Shedding light on the relationship between the sciences and the arts, this book examines how writers such as Lewis Carroll, T. S. Eliot, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Howe both respond to and react against logic. It proposes a new framework to account for this agonistic relationship, arguing that the mathematisation of logic in the mid-nineteenth century created a productive tension between logic and literature, spurring modernist and postmodernist innovations, and catalysing the development of AI.
Covering topics such as developments in computing from Ada Lovelace to AI; the cross-fertilisation of logic and literature from Lewis Carroll to Susan Howe; and recent advances in digital texts and neural nets, this book also speaks eloquently to contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence and the fate of the humanities.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Table of Contents
Sangam MacDuff (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Part I: Victorian and Modernist Logic
1. Victorian Equations:The Logic of Exchange in Nineteenth-Century England
Andrea Kelly Henderson (UC Irvine, USA)
2. Not as a Logician: Victoria Welby and Susan Howe read C.S. Peirce
Helen Thaventhiran (University of Cambridge, UK)
3. On Not Being Made of Literature: Franz Kafka and the Logical Priority of Life
Patrick Jones (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
4. 'that flame… that flame… that burns away filthy logic': Samuel Beckett and the Aporias of Digitality
Balazs Rapcsak (University of Basel, Switzerland)
5. Logic and its Other in the Modernist Architectural Manifesto
David Spurr (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Part II: Postmodern Developments
6. I.A. Richards and Cybernetics
Simon Swift (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
7. Entrenchment Versus Indeterminacy: Disposing of gavagai, quaddition and grue
Ian MacKenzie (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
8. Logic and Life: On Robert Besson's L'Argent
Robert B. Pippin (University of Chicago, USA)
9. The Illogic of Fiction: Speculative Reflections on Abduction, Naturalization, and Signification in Narrative
Simona Bartolotta (University of Oxford, UK)
10. The Logic of the Clinamen in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: Swerving across Light Materiality, Utopia, and Queer Poetics
Alberto Tondello (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Part III: Artificial Intelligence and Posthumanism
11. How a Picture No-Longer Held us Captive: Playful Logics and Creativity Across Media
Dorothy Butchard and Niall Gallen (University of Birmingham, UK)
12. Talking Machines, Missing Secretaries, and Bad Readers
Rebecca Roach (University of Birmingham, UK)
13. Reading Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun with AI: What Does ChatGPT Think Makes Humans Unique?
Megan Quigley (Villanova University, USA)
14. The Interplay Between the Anthropomorphism of Automata and the Mechanisation of Humanity as Represented in Contemporary Cinema
Jannik Küchen (University of Tübingen, Germany) and Diogo Sasdelli (Danube University. Austria)
Index
Product details
| Published | Nov 12 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 9781350585058 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 13 bw illus |
| Series | Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
