Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Germany
fellow
Gero Guttzeit
Home institution
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Country of origin (home institution)
Germany
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies
Literature
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Gero Guttzeit’s work in literary and cultural studies is guided by theoretical interests in authorship, character, and rhetoric. He has been a visiting professor at Milwaukee, Freiburg, and Tübingen and a visiting scholar at Berkeley and Ghent. His first book on The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric came out in 2017 with DeGruyter. His second book, In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility Since the Eighteenth Century, will be published by Palgrave. His articles have appeared in such venues as Forum for Modern Language Studies, Scholarly Editing, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Anglistik. His expertise in authorship, rhetoric, gothic studies, and invisibility studies informs his FRIAS project that develops a critical aesthetics of generative AI.
Research Project
An Aesthetic Critique of Generative AI: Autonomy, Literature, and the Age of Large Language Models
The analysis of the social, political, and ecological costs and opportunities of so-called generative artificial intelligence needs to be complemented by its aesthetic critique. This project employs key terms from the longue durée of aesthetic theory – the sublime, the grotesque, the interesting, the uncanny, and the eerie – to understand the current impact of generative AI on contemporary cultures of writing and reading. It addresses the question how generative AI – with its apparent autonomy – transforms ideas of the aesthetic autonomy of the author and the work. In providing an alternative AI aesthetics to existent models in media studies, the project will demonstrate that the critical perspectives of literary and cultural theory as well as the creative perspectives of contemporary literary texts are vital for current debates on generative AI in and beyond the university.
Research Interests:
authorship theory; rhetoric; popular literature; cultural history of invisibility