This past Friday, the Undergraduate Writing Program hosted an event titled “Writing Inside & Outside the Academy” with Professor Dennis Yi Tenen and Dr. Nicole B. Wallack.

On Friday, November 15, the Undergraduate Writing Program hosted “Writing Inside & Outside the Academy,” an open discussion with Professor Dennis Yi Tenen and Dr. Nicole B. Wallack concerning Tenen’s compositional practice, history as a writer for academic and other publics, and key pieces of his research.

The Undergraduate Writing Program (UWP) is the “home of the Writing Center and oversees all sections of University Writing” to support “thousands of Columbia undergraduate and graduate students while maintaining a thriving community of teachers, scholars, poets, fiction writers, playwrights, scientists, non-fiction writers: writers of all stripes.”

Wallack, the Director of the UWP, provided opening remarks for the eager audience. “In order to truly have an essay-driven writing…program,” she began, “it’s important to understand essay not just as one kind of thing you do in one kind of course, but indeed as…a disposition for making knowledge, for dealing with our own ignorance—as not a liability but as something to be interested in.” Wallack also emphasized that there will always be occasions when essayists must explain their disciplinary concerns to those outside their realms of understanding, addressing why this discussion was so crucial to host.

After her opening remarks, she introduced Tenen, an Associate Professor of English at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Media. Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Elaine Scarry and William Todd. The founder of Columbia’s Literary Modeling and Visualization Lab, he co-edits the On Method book series at Columbia University Press. His published works include Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017), Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024), and Author Function under contract with Chicago UP. 

Tenen then explained the process through which he became a writer. He stated that the most important part of his backstory is that English is not his first language, and therefore, it is not something that easily flows out of him. That, however, did not deter him from continuing to write, and he ultimately learned to embrace that side of himself in his work. He also recounted some funny stories, such as his high school teacher accusing him of plagiarism because his writing was “too good,” which was met with laughs from the audience.

The topic then shifted to discuss how Tenen writes, and he highlighted the physicality of his work. “I was looking for the tactile pleasure of working with text,” he stated, “and I was not getting it from Microsoft Word.” He then explained that he eventually embraced the command line and its organizational properties, showing the audience an example of how one of his books was organized in the program. “Here,” Tenen continued, “you can organize it in a more direct way.”

However, Tenen pushed back against the idea that he always plans his writing sessions, stating that sometimes there are moments when you have to sit and simply let the thoughts flow, referring to this type of creativity as “bottom-up,” as opposed to the organized “top-down” method. Ultimately, he especially emphasized using tools that are tailored to the way you write, not the way he writes. 

Later, the conversation turned to Tenen’s Literary Theory for Robots, and he explained his inspirations for the book, which included Georges Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, a work targeted towards professional authors. Tenen also discussed the influences of ChatGPT on his work, stating that “there is this non-human composition of forces that have always been part of the writing process, and we have to study them.” Here, he gave the example of a dictionary, calling it “the pinnacle of technological language development” and “a tool that makes you smarter.” After making this point, he stressed that writing must inherently be a social process, as dozens of other people have worked together to create those tools.

Finally, Tenen shared a short excerpt from his upcoming work, which was met with applause from the crowd. The event concluded with a Q&A session where Tenen answered questions from the audience, who left with new and insightful wisdom imparted to them, feeling literarily inspired by the discussion.

Writing Event via Author