Voice Imitators: Reading Thomas Bernhard with AI

Graduate / Professional

This course seeks to situate Thomas Bernhard’s prose miniatures collected in The Voice Imitator (Der Stimmenimitator, 1978) in relations to questions generated by artificial intelligence. We come together to write about and discuss the microstories collected in this volume in light of Bernhard’s other writings, important literary works by other authors, radio programs, films, and contemporary writing on AI. We experiment with various AI models to see what kinds of readings advanced language models might generate. We measure our own multidisciplinary, theoretically nuanced interpretations against those of the “machine”—and see where this “dialogue” with AI might take us. Bernhard’s microstories, which reflect profoundly on contingency, mimesis, imitation, performativity, averageness, and speech acts, offer a rich starting point for such analyses. F 11:45am-1:40pm