Free spaces of imaginal adventure: voicing silence in AI and literature

This chapter aims to demonstrate that the narrative dynamics and literary hermeneutics of silence profoundly trouble the largely functionalist and linguistic paradigms with which AI research currently associates silence. Taking case studies from the silences and blank spaces in works by poet and translator Anne Carson, and drawing upon salient insights into gaps and gutters from comics narratology, it explores some of the ways in which human readers and writers voice silence in literature. It suggests that the ways in which human and machine intelligences respectively ‘mind the gap’ in language and literature merits further investigation, and that greater collaboration between AI researchers and those in the humanities might help both better understand how future AIs could model and voice silence.