Prominent among the many controversies that have accompanied the rapid rise and spread of Generative AI, particularly large language model chatbots like ChatGPT, have been debates—philosophical as well as practical—concerning the relationship between language and ownership: to whom—or what—does linguistic production “belong”? Does an entity need to have attained “personhood” to have free speech rights under the First Amendment? While Amy Wong’s thoughtful study of representations of linguistic production in late Victorian fictions of empire appears just a split-second (so to speak) before the entrance of these issues upon the cultural stage, its historically grounded discussion of the emergence of kindred debates in the fin-de-siècle Anglosphere will strike readers as particularly timely today. Wong begins by proposing a foundational categorial distinction between “speech” and “talk,” with the former representing more an idea or ideology than an objective category of linguistic production: it is a “proprietary fantasy” whose investment in “a...
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December 2024
Book Review|
December 01 2024
Review: Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk, by Amy R. Wong
Amy R. Wong,
Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk
. Stanford
: Stanford University Press
, 2023
. Pp. ix + 228. $70.
Aaron Worth
Aaron Worth
Boston University
Aaron Worth is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He is the author of Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 (Ohio State University Press, 2014) and editor, most recently, of The Wendigo and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is currently working on a study of conjuring in Victorian culture.
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Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 79 (3): 225–228.
Citation
Aaron Worth; Review: Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk, by Amy R. Wong. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2024; 79 (3): 225–228. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.79.3.225
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