Tag: literary theory

Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

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Georgia Rose Phillips “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28.   The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”. As…

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Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

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Georgia Rose Phillips For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language. When I first learnt how to create…

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In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

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Georgia Rose Phillips Sometimes, the line of a poem leaps out unexpectedly from the well of my consciousness when I encounter something close to what it resembles in the real world. On an unseasonably cold November day in Semaphore, South Australia late last year, I heard a line from Ashbery’s “Syringa” as I walked up the beach. I had been pressing through the afternoon’s sharp sandy gusts and feeling the overhang of winter in the cold sting of the breeze. As I moved towards the grey surface of water, dotted with white foamy caps, I had been starting to doubt…

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Archival bots: My mother, my model for language

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Jenny Hedley During two stages in my life—at age seven and again in my twenties—I acted as surrogate speaker when head-and-neck cancer muted my mother’s voice. In the years between, we collaborated on so many creative projects that our voices often became enmeshed. I have perpetuated this mother–daughter entanglement eighteen years after her death by training a small language model (SLM) on a dataset of personal writing which includes her voice. Specifically, my JenAI language model’s ‘memoir’-tagged voice trained upon my unpublished manuscript ‘Hermit Crab Diary’ which weaves together my mother’s and my 2005–2007 diary entries with my contemporaneous reflections.…

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Generative AI model training: Why do you sound like me? Because I am you

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Jenny Hedley My first fine-tuned small language model (SLM) was a boring failure who sounded didactic, encyclopaedic. JenAI v1 had trained on approximately 280,000 words of my creative writing and yet still had the (un)distinctive (non)voice of a bot trained on textbook-quality data.[1] I had tagged each of my training datasets with <author>, <genre>, and <subgenre> so that the model could learn that Jenny Hedley’s nonfiction writing—in memoir, academic, or poetic form—should read a particular way. My Python training scripts needed adjusting to make my self-miming language model more faithful to my voice, tone, and the themes of my writing.…

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