In his critical essay James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, Marshall McLuhan makes reference (on page 38 of Interior Landscape) to a passage in critic Paul Valéry’s book Variety V (1945).
The quoted passage is on the nature of language as used by writers. Valéry calls for a reinvention of literary studies which makes use of ancient wisdom and pedagogy—the classical trivium; the figures of rhetoric in particular—to go beyond merely chronicling authors and their lives, and get scientific about language. Those who study today’s large language models will find Valéry’s observations premonitory of their own.
The following is a translation of the full passage (287-293 of Variété V) into English—undertaken, naturally, by a large language model.
The history of literature has greatly expanded in our time and now enjoys numerous academic posts. It is striking, by
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