January 2023

Last November, OpenAI, a Bay Area research company specializing in artificial intelligence, introduced the universe to a program called ChatGPT-3. Within five days, one million people had jumped on the program to play around with it.  For reference, it took Facebook ten months to reach one million users and Netflix three and a half years. …

When editors of a book on the history of the Mexican novel asked me to contribute an essay on the longest books written during the 20th century, I accepted. There was no reason not to, and I was the right guy for the job. My work in historical fiction and high modernist fiction in Spanish …

There I was, a rhetorician reading poetry. I found this amusing given the disciplinary history of rhetoric and poetry. Aristotle wrote a treatise called The Rhetoric and another called The Poetics because those were separate fields for him. However, the two exist between the same covers on my shelf as The Rhetoric and the Poetics …

January has returned, trailing clouds of new year’s resolutions. My return to campus coincides with a return to the MLA Convention for the first time in more than a decade. I know that for many in the college, the yearly MLA gathering signals an important temporal point on the academic calendar while providing valuable professional …