Why AI Could Not Have Written Overdetermined Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
It occurred to me recently that I belong to a special club: the last generation of humans to have had the privilege of writing their own books. I have three coming out this year, including Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone, my first monograph in literary studies. Overdetermined is the product of more than twenty years of thinking about the relationships between literature and identity, research and teaching, and creative writers and their critics. I poured everything I know about being a student and professor of literature into that book. And I wrote every word myself.
Of course, my book benefited from peer review, editorial feedback, and the careful work of copyeditors. None of us writes entirely alone; scholarship is always collaborative. But when I say I wrote the book myself, I mean I experienced the full agony and ecstasy of wrestling with clumsy sentences, coaxing stubborn paragraphs into place, finessing each punctuation mark, revising chapter structures again and again, and even drafting my own marketing copy. These are exactly the kinds of tasks at which AI programs—especially the new large language models—are starting to excel. So much so that I suspect nearly every scholarly book or article published after 2025 will bear traces of interaction with AI.
What does this mean for the literary studies monograph, a form that stakes its value on the author’s skills in close reading, which, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith reminds us, is first and foremost a mode of writing? What does this mean for a profession in which, as one of my college professors used to say, “there is no thinking without writing, and no writing without rewriting”?
Writing about teaching and reflecting on the “total situation” of our lives and labor in academe strikes me as the most honest way to show what is distinct about the human work of literary scholarship.
I’m an older millennial and parent to two school-age children. Scholars of my generation were beneficiaries of historically specific training in reading and writing that is rapidly becoming obsolete. I grew up annotating textbooks and novels in the margins; I still pull the hard copies from my shelves today. In high school, I wrote essays by hand and took the SAT and AP tests on paper. In college, I typed seminar papers, but our classrooms were generally laptop- and tablet-free. By contrast, my children in Texas public schools learn through online apps, receive AI-generated curricula, take standardized (often adaptive) tests on computers, and—according to paperwork I just received from our district—will be expected, starting in eighth grade, to use Microsoft Copilot as a learning partner.
As a parent and professor, I’m acutely aware of what my children and students are not learning. Yet I know that blanket critiques of educational technology are rarely persuasive. My instinct is to defend the laborious work of writing and rewriting (along with the value of hard copies, pen-and-paper tests, and in-person education), because I know how my own thinking has grown through that process. But acting on those instincts must be grounded in clear-eyed reflection about what is at stake if we stop reading and writing our own books.
I called Overdetermined a monograph in literary studies, but it is also an attempt to chart a way out of some of our conventional habits in the study and teaching of literature. Its key questions arise not from inside the literary texts themselves, but from course syllabi and real-life professional situations. The book does not sidestep my own identitarian position or that of the writers I study, but rather leans into identity as a provocation: a reminder to keep tracking our distance from the objects to which we must inevitably return. The result is a mode of framing literary argument that is experiential, relational, embodied, and collaborative—one that asks the reader to engage with literature as a lived and accented encounter.
I want Overdetermined to make an affirmative case for the value of the academic humanities in general, and literary studies in particular.
Alongside a critical introduction and afterword, the book contains four author-focused chapters and three interchapters I call “recesses.” “Recess” is both noun and verb, place and process, space and time. A recess can be a hidden or remote corner, or an adjournment from business as usual. I use this form so that Overdetermined feels at once familiar and radical: it guides readers through some of the established terrain of ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone literary studies while questioning how that terrain was built up in the first place.
Each chapter and recess opens with an anecdote tied to my “institutional position” when I first conceived the question at its heart. I tell stories about failed peer review, chance meetings in a conference hotel, a botched job-talk moment, a memorial for an academic superstar. From these scenes I draw the questions that guide my readings. My author-focused chapters additionally begin with syllabi for my actual classes, through which I stage the pedagogical situations in which the featured texts might or might not be taught.
All this layering—so much framing! so much setup!—has a purpose. I want Overdetermined to make an affirmative case for the value of the academic humanities in general, and literary studies in particular. Writing about teaching and reflecting on the “total situation” of our lives and labor in academe strikes me as the most honest way to show what is distinct about the human work of literary scholarship. Journalists, freelancers, book reviewers, and now chatbots: all can and do produce work that reads like literary criticism. What distinguishes the scholar-teacher’s criticism is that it is forged in specific curricular, disciplinary, and institutional contexts.
The English classroom is both a formative location we have forgotten and the place where we might yet remember who we are.
As I write in the book’s introduction, “Writing about teaching is something we can do that the distant-reading computers and algorithmically writing AI bots cannot.” Citing Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive, I note their observation: “Perhaps singularly among the disciplines, literary study is enacted rather than rehearsed in classrooms; the answer to the question ‘Did I miss anything last week?’ is truly ‘Yes—and you missed it forever.’”
DEVONthink can scan archives faster than we can, and ChatGPT can mimic our prose in seconds, but neither was in class last week—or the week before, or the week before that. If we don’t record what we have been doing with literature in our classrooms—taking seriously how job talk snafus haunt our syllabi, and aspirations about public intellectualism inform our readings of final papers—that knowledge will be lost forever.
I share Buurma and Heffernan’s view that we practitioners of English literary studies suffer from a “collective amnesia” about our discipline’s history, and that the classroom is the key site from which to theorize the field and recover its plural histories. The English classroom is both a formative location we have forgotten and the place where we might yet remember who we are. It is where we induct students into the projects of self-knowing and self-forgetting we call “American,” “Anglophone,” and “world” literatures—where we mispronounce (and learn to recognize) our own and each other’s names. It is where we produce selves and others, and where, beyond receiving what is known, teachers and students engage in a shared process of value creation and contestation, as the critical labor of the collective supersedes the vantage of the solitary reader.
That is what Overdetermined sets out to capture: a retrospective understanding of the affordances of our collaborative human intelligence before the age of reading and writing alongside AI. The book is a record of what it means to read together in real time—something no algorithm or language model, however sophisticated, will ever be able to recover. Which is why we need to write it down ourselves.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University, and the author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone.