Abstract

With the disruptive rise of generative AI, literary scholars face unprecedented interpretive challenges involving basic assumptions and practices. Amid the automated outsourcing of discourse essential to coalescence of human intellect and personal identity, Mark Twain’s imaginative and literary journey can heighten our awareness of imperiled foundational relationships of self to utterance. Early sketches portray struggles with words as high-stakes adventures in self-creation; in the final Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, however, Mark Twain approaches celebration of creative process without restrictions and inhibitions, even those of one discrete and supposedly consequential identity.

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