Episode 137: The Creativity Fallacy

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, who created the intentional fallacy and kicked off the slow death of the author.

What does it mean to be a creator at a time when creativity is completely commodified? In this episode, we talk about the status of the author, and how audiences have idealized artists while also celebrating the so-called death of the author and rise of the reader. Plus: how AI converts our minds into apps, and why the intentional fallacy blew up the literary world in the 1940s! Later we’re joined by Mary Anne Mohanraj, an author and professor of literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who tells us about using AI in the college classroom.

Notes, citations, etc.

Mary Anne Mohanraj, author most recently of Tornado.

“Best humans still outperform artificial intelligence in a creative divergent thinking task,” Nature Scientific Reports, Sept. 14, 2023.

“AI Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says,” by Winston Cho in The Hollywood Reporter

“Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for Copyright Infringement,” by Wes Davis in The Verge

“Artists vs. AI,” on NPR’s The Indicator

“The Intentional Fallacy,” by Wimsatt & Beardsley (1946)

“The Death of the Author,” [PDF] by Roland Barthes (1967)

Mythologies, by Roland Barthes

A great example of reader response analysis is Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984), where she asked romance readers what they get out of the genre.