In Short: Ben Lerner's "The Hofmann Wobble" with Matilda Lin Berke (Online)

In “The Hofmann Wobble,” Ben Lerner explores the slippage between life and art—as well as truth and fiction—with an eye toward the construction of digital avatars and facts alike. As with most of Lerner’s writing, the main structural points of the story are drawn from fact, but the details are fiction, and they “wobble” throughout the piece. These narrative tricks provide a metatextual container for the themes of the text: revision, the creation of avatars, and the construction of truth. Perhaps the “truest” part is the concluding conversation between the author and ChatGPT, in which Lerner implicates and names both himself and the nature of his project.

Lerner’s incorporation of text generated by artificial intelligence (as well as his open disclosure of that technique) provides an interesting template for contemporary discourses on autofiction, AI, and general replications of thought/experience. In addition to discussing the themes of the short story at large, this course will navigate possibilities for human-machine hybridity while investigating the ethics and efficacy of large language model (LLM) usage in art.