AI in Contemporary Fiction

This seminar will explore the representation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in twenty-first century fiction and the impact AI is having on contemporary literature. The course focuses on three novels that engage with AI both creatively and critically: Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). We will read these novels alongside Winterson’s 12 Bytes (2021), a collection of literary essays on artificial intelligence, as well as a range of critical and fictional reflections on AI by contemporary authors such as Kamila Shamsie, Nick Harkaway, Ted Chiang, and Benjamín Labatut. In addition to studying AI in contemporary literature, we will consider examples of AI-generated fiction, including a metafictional short story by ChatGPT which went viral in 2025, and extracts from a novel produced by David Cope’s Artificial Linguistic Machine Algorithm (ALMA). Reading these texts in the light of recent scholarship from the emerging field of Critical AI Studies will allow us to explore some of the fundamental questions raised by AI in Contemporary Fiction, such as the nature of authorship, creativity, and what it means to be (post)human, as well as the social, political, ethical, and environmental impacts of artifical intelligence.

Course Texts to buy:

·      Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me (Penguin, 2019) – ISBN: 978-1-529-11125-5

·      Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (Penguin, 2019) – ISBN: 978-1-784-70995-2

·      Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Penguin Random House 2021) – ISBN: 978-0-593-31817-1