Themed Research Seminar (Aesthetics, AI, Criticism, and Cultural Form) Session 3: Machine Learning and the History of Style: On the Normal Scientific Study of Verse

Session 3: Machine Learning and the History of Style: On the Normal Scientific Study of Verse 

Presented by: Dr Christian Gelder and Dr Joseph Steinberg

Date: Friday 8 May 2026
Time: 12-1pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in person at 09-738 (Level 7, Michie)

Title: Machine Learning and the History of Style: On the Normal Scientific Study of Verse

Abstract:

At the end of the nineteenth century, and in the first decades of the twentieth, scientists and scholars counted the word-frequency of hundreds of novels and measured the lengths of sentences from different periods of literary history; they debated which ‘scientific’ method should be applied to literary criticism, from the statistical to the classificatory or the inductive. In fact, this post-Enlightenment—post-Kantian, in a way—project posed key questions about how it is possible to produce knowledge about literature, and the political fantasms that underpin the rational search for a science of verse. This paper tracks how researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning often invoke these nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century studies in poetics as historical models for their technology. For all the theories of language that literary criticism has championed throughout the twentieth-century—from structuralism to ordinary language philosophy—it was the statistical, measurable and mathematisable dimension of language at work in the late nineteenth-century scientific study of poetry that seems to have become the most important and relevant today. It then talks about a particular mode of reading poetry that can resist this attempt at scientific determination.

Speaker bios:

Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow and soon to be ARC DECRA Fellow at Macquarie University. He is the author of The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present (CUP 2026) and Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) with Robert Boncardo. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Psychoanalysis and History, Literature and Medicine and elsewhere.

Dr Joseph Steinberg is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Queensland, and a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He works on the history of creative writing and close reading: his first book, The Program Goes South, is under contract with Sydney University Press. His articles and reviews have been published in The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, Australian Literary Studies, the Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere.