Logic, Modern Literature and Artificial Intelligence

Examining the relationship between these fields for the first time, this book explores a series of surprising affinities between symbolic logic, literature, and AI, from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

Shedding light on the relationship between the sciences and the arts, this book examines how writers such as Lewis Carroll, T. S. Eliot, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Howe both respond to and react against logic. It proposes a new framework to account for this agonistic relationship, arguing that the mathematisation of logic in the mid-nineteenth century created a productive tension between logic and literature, spurring modernist and postmodernist innovations, and catalysing the development of AI.

Covering topics such as developments in computing from Ada Lovelace to AI; the cross-fertilisation of logic and literature from Lewis Carroll to Susan Howe; and recent advances in digital texts and neural nets, this book also speaks eloquently to contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence and the fate of the humanities.