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Please join the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now for a talk entitled “Character Types: Representing the Human in Print” by Geoff Turnvosky (Professor of French, University of Washington).

Abstract: 
In many ways, the anxieties recently unleashed by generative AI and by the prospect of AI replacing humans in creative and expressive tasks long considered to be definingly human rehash older debates about the impacts of digitization – of screens, hypertextuality, and algorithms – on equally defining human capacities: the ability to read, to parse and assess information, and perhaps above all, to concentrate and follow a sustained argument or narrative. These debates have tended to "naturalize" preexisting technologies – handwriting or the printed book –, in order to stand the forms and practices to which the latter gave rise in stark opposition to the digital, as safe-havens for genuine human expression and communication. We see this prelapsarian vision of the predigital reflected in websites today enumerating "the benefits of reading,” one of which is almost always empathy. These sites show readers with printed books in their hands (empathy-cultivating reading is invariably idealized as analog) and often surrounded by vibrant greenery. Yet while current rhetoric underscores breaks and "revolutions," the loss of the old or the promise of the new, the reality is that the digital, including AI, is inhabited by the technologies of the predigital era, which continue decisively to shape online experiences. Among these technologies are characters, understood in both senses of the word: textual figurations of the human as encountered in fiction and letterforms as streamlined by typography. My talk explores both and their interrelation, notably in the phenomenon of printed letters which offer impressions of unmediated contact with the human via the translation of scribal into typographic writing. What can we learn for better navigating today's debates about AI from this earlier history of how technologies were leveraged to replicate the human and cultivate interpersonal contact?

Bio:
is a Professor of French and co-director of the at the University of Washington. He specializes in the cultural history of early modern France and Europe, with emphasis on the history of print, books, authorship and reading. These interests extend to the history of technological change; the evolution and remediation of textual archives from manuscript to print and now from print into data and digital formats; the past, present and future of editing and publication; and copyright. In 2011, he published (University of Pennsylvania Press). , which explores connections between new paradigms of immersive reading and developments in typography in 17th- and 18th-century France, appeared in 2024 with èצӰ�� Press. His articles have appeared in Romanic Review, XVIIe Siècle, Modern Language Quarterly, SVEC, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Eighteenth-Century Studies. As co-director of UW Textual Studies, Turnovsky spearheaded the creation of and continues to oversee the graduate certificate in Textual and Digital Studies and the minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities.

Hosted by the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now Research Group, sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit and co-sponsored by the  and .

This event is part of .