L&S First-Year Pathways

What is literature in the age of ChatGPT? How does poetry change when writing has been automated? And when any text you read could be produced by an artificial intelligence, does the difference between human and machine writing still make sense? In this course, we explore the impact of the most recent large language models on how literature is made and read today, and discover the history of computerized writing from the early experiments of the 1950s to today’s AI systems, with a detour via the Baroque. We will ask questions such as: What kind of language does a language model produce? What is meaning for a machine that cannot mean anything? Can computers be authors? And is there anything left for us to write? The course combines the close reading of computer-generated texts and learning to reflect about their theoretical background with creative computational student projects. No prior programming skills are necessary. This class will be taught in English.

A lecture/seminar satisfying the second half of the Reading & Composition requirement, R4B offers structured and sustained practice in the processes used in reading, critical analysis, and writing. Students engage with thematically-related materials from a range of genres and media. In response, they craft short pieces leading to longer expository and/or argumentative essays. Students develop a research question, draft a research essay, gather, evaluate, and synthesize information from various sources. Elements of the research process–a proposal, an annotated bibliography, an abstract, a works cited list, etc.–are submitted with the final report in a research portfolio. Students write a minimum of 32 pages of prose.

Science as we know is the product of a historical process. In this course, we will explore the emergence of its concepts, practices, goals, and cognitive authority by surveying its roots in their social and cultural setting. We will trace the development of conceptions of the natural world from antiquity through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and up to the modern age. All the sciences fall within our purview, from their early forms up to today.