THE EVOLUTION OF THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHARACTER IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

This article traces the evolution of the artificial intelligence character in American prose fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 2020s by examining four classical instruments of literary characterization: portrait, dialogue, landscape, and monologue. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and of the author’s “excess of seeing,” Jurij Lotman’s semiotics of artistic space, the Russian Formalist concepts of the dominant and of literary evolution, Dorrit Cohn’s narratology of consciousness, and posthumanist criticism, the study argues that the history of the artificial character in American literature can be read as a gradual migration of narrative authority from human to machine. In the first half of the century, in the works of Baum, del Rey, Asimov, and Williamson, the machine is chiefly an object of portraiture, measured by the human gaze against the human body. After the “imitation game” proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, dialogue becomes dominant, and novels by Heinlein, Dick, Gerrold, and Pohl stage conversation as a trial of personhood. Cyberpunk writers such as Gibson and Stephenson, together with their contemporary Powers, dissolve artificial intelligence into landscape, network, and infrastructure, inverting Leo Marx’s “machine in the garden” into a garden inside the machine. Twenty-first-century fiction by Chiang, Leckie, Robinson, Hall, Chambers, Newitz, Wells, and Greer grants the artificial mind its own monologue and makes it the focalizing consciousness that portrays humans and composes landscapes. The four modes, the article concludes, are not neutral techniques but the sites at which American fiction negotiates the possibility of machine personhood and at which the novel discovers the artifice of its own devices.