"not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery"

22 May 2025: Getting started in earnest working through the articles and books for the “Year’s Work in Humor Studies” that I am once again co-writing, beginning with the Twain stuff. I found myself really into Bruce Michelson’s piece about what Twain can teach us about AI. Here’s a long passage that I enthusiastically marked up (setting up Michelson’s point that Twain is a writer work turning to on this topic): 

“Utterance that matters to us is not a labor of exposition so much as a labor of discovery. We become who we are, we construct and furbish our own consciousness by struggling for the right words; and the result—again, if we are lucky—is not just felicitous utterance but deeper and richer inner life. The kind of writing that matters is never a low-engagement process of fitting discourse together like pieces from an IKEA flat-pack. The effort of revision, of ruthlessly interrogating ourselves on relationships between each possible utterance and the next, is not a tidying up but a telling of a story— in some dimensions always a fiction—of one’s own mind in motion, describing or implying cognitive and emotional journeys with more poise and clearer steadier direction than the actual jumps, backtracks, and flashes from which presentable thinking might (thanks to these private struggles to find the words and the order) eventually emerge. Which leads to at least one collateral paradox: though veteran teachers may see a measure of truth in my attempt here to describe these dynamics, they also recognize how difficult it can be to convey it, given the imperatives and longstanding practices embedded in how American colleges and universities normally teach the production of passable expository prose” (4-5).

Work Cited

Michelson, Bruce. "Mark Twain Legacies in the Dawn of Gen AI." The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 22, 2024, p. 1-20.