臺大外文系學術演講

📖Abstract

What is the intellectual pleasure of reading Macbeth? Shakespeare makes familiar things look strange, and readers derive joy from the experience of estrangement. There is joy in the subjunctive mood—the realm of hypotheticals, not actuals. In this literary virtuality, readers enter an inquisitive state of mind. Shakespeare creates imaginary spaces that take us out of the lived realities of our daily grind.

The arrival of publicly available generative AI tools has raised alarm about negative artificial experience. This necessitates a humanistic re-evaluation of trust, the concept of virtuality. Both generative AI and imaginative literature create virtuality which can be theorized as artificial experiences. The challenges presented by AI are anthropological rather than merely technological. The current AI hype obscures corporate mismanagement while framing education as a joyless, transactional process. Restoring meta-critical joy is a solution.

Using Macbeth as an example, this presentation suggests strategies to restore curiosity and to develop meta-critical joy. By reframing human relationships with technology, educators and students can prioritize the affective processes of discovery and community-oriented storytelling.

With dramaturgical lessons derived from Shakespeare, readers can still have intellectual joy in the era of disruptive generative AI. The joy of estrangement is in and by itself the purpose of education.

👤About the Speaker

Professor Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English and she directs the Digital Humanities Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.