PD Dr. Gero Guttzeit – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

PD Dr. Gero Guttzeit

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
English Literary Studies

Senior Fellow
FRIAS Fellowship Programmes

October 2025 – March 2026

Website

Blog

ORCID ID

E-Mail: gero.guttzeit@lmu.de

Last Update: 20.10.2025

Curriculum Vitae

Gero Guttzeit’s work in literary and cultural studies is guided by theoretical interests in authorship, character, and rhetoric. He has been a visiting professor at Milwaukee, Freiburg, and Tübingen and a visiting scholar at Berkeley and Ghent. His first book on The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric came out in 2017 with DeGruyter. His second book, In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility Since the Eighteenth Century, will be published by Palgrave. His articles have appeared in such venues as Forum for Modern Language Studies, Scholarly Editing, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Anglistik. His expertise in authorship, rhetoric, gothic studies, and invisibility studies informs his FRIAS project that develops a critical aesthetics of generative AI.

Selected Publications

Gero Guttzeit. The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric. Anglia Book Series 56. Berlin, Boston: DeGruyter 2017. (Paperback 2018). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110520156.
Gero Guttzeit. “Authoring Monsters: Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Early Nineteenth-Century Figures of Gothic Authorship.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.3 (2018), 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqy018.
Gero Guttzeit and Isabel Kalous. “Covering Surveillance: The Visualization of Contemporary Surveillance on Scholarly Book Covers.” On_Culture Perspective. Vol. 6 Surveillance Cultures 2021. https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2018.1250.
Gero Guttzeit., ed. Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility. Special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 72 (1). 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2039.
Gero Guttzeit. In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility Since the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming late 2025 / early 2026.

FRIAS Project

An Aesthetic Critique of Generative AI: Autonomy, Literature, and the Age of Large Language Models

The analysis of the social, political, and ecological costs and opportunities of so-called generative artificial intelligence needs to be complemented by its aesthetic critique. This project employs key terms from the longue durée of aesthetic theory – the sublime, the grotesque, the interesting, the uncanny, and the eerie – to understand the current impact of generative AI on contemporary cultures of writing and reading. It addresses the question how generative AI – with its apparent autonomy – transforms ideas of the aesthetic autonomy of the author and the work. In providing an alternative AI aesthetics to existent models in media studies, the project will demonstrate that the critical perspectives of literary and cultural theory as well as the creative perspectives of contemporary literary texts are vital for current debates on generative AI in and beyond the university.