Research / Mind
Mind
Two decades of work on how knowing happens — memory, perception, interpretation. Literary scholarship on Baudelaire, Proust, Plato, Kafka, Woolf, and Wordsworth investigates how minds know what they know. The AI work on what large language models do to authorship and interpretation continues the same investigation in a new register.
What LLMs do to mind and interpretation
- “AI Comes for the Author” (Elkins, Poetics Today 45.2, 2024) — what large language models do to authorship as a cognitive and aesthetic category. Engaged by James Phelan in Poetics Today 45.2 (2024) as part of an “instructive debate.” Cross-listed with Creativity.
- “A(I) University in Ruins” (cross-listed with AI in Higher Education) — Cao et al. (arXiv 2025) anchor a central theoretical claim on the article: “An ‘objective' model, according to Katherine Elkins, cannot exist.”
Memory
- “Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion: Configurations of a Non-Archival Memory in Baudelaire and Proust” (Elkins, Discourse 24.3, 2002) — the non-archival memory framework, adopted by Alison Luyten in Manuscrítica 28 (2015, Antwerp / Dirk Van Hulle ecosystem) and Taylor Johnston in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.3 (2018).
- “Memory and Material Significance: Composing Modernist Influence” (Elkins, Modern Language Quarterly 69.4, 2008).
- “Memory, Technology, and Wisdom” (Elkins, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2022) — philosophy of memory and technological mediation.
Perception and modernity
- “Stalled Flight: Horatian Remains in Baudelaire's Le Cygne” (Elkins, Comparative Literature Studies 39.1, 2002; A. Owen Aldridge Prize) — perception under modernity. Cited as canonical authority on Horace 2.20 as model for Le Cygne by Sonam Singh in Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012) and Marko Marinčič in Acta Neophilologica 42 (2009). See also Recognition.
Interpretation
- “Picture Lessons in Kafka's The Trial” (Elkins, MLN 136.3, 2021) — interpretation as a structural property.
- “The Compounded Subject: Wordsworth's Literary Sublime” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Sublime in British Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Lyric and philosophical knowing
- “Naming the Lyric: Literature versus Philosophy in Plato's Symposium” (Elkins, Philosophy and Literature 44.2, 2020) — Sappho-in-Alcibiades recovery; lyric versus philosophical kinds of knowing. Cited by Rick Anthony Furtak in Kierkegaard, Socrates, and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Proust
- Editor, Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2022) — eight chapters by Joshua Landy (Stanford), Elisabeth Ladenson (Columbia), Christie McDonald (Harvard), Patrick Bray, Richard Moran (Harvard), Robert Pippin (Chicago), Dora Zhang, and Elkins. Cited by Tom Stern in European Journal of Philosophy 33.2 (2025, p. 723 fn. 6).
- “Proust's Family at Home” (Elkins, H-France Salon, 2021).
- “Proust's Novel Time” in Time and Literature (De Gruyter, 2023).
Roundtables and public engagement
- Helix Center, “Coding and the New Human Phenotype” (October 2022).
- Helix Center NLG roundtable with Ned Block, Francesca Rossi, and Kyunghyun Cho (2022, one month before ChatGPT).