Machine Totems: Hughes' Shamanic Poetics in the Age of AI
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2025.v10.n7.023Keywords:
Shamanic poetics, Machine totems, AI and poetry, Myth and technology, Anthropocene poetics, Techno-shamanism, Computational creativityAbstract
This paper examines Ted Hughes’ shamanic poetics through the lens of artificial intelligence, arguing that his animal totems (Crow, Pike, The Jaguar) anticipate contemporary tensions between organic consciousness and machine intelligence. By analyzing Hughes’ ritualistic verse structures alongside AI text generators’ ‘hallucinations,’ the study reveals how both systems employ fractured mythologies to navigate liminal states of being. The paper bridges Hughes’ ecological uncanny with posthumanist theory (Haraway, Hayles) and cognitive science (Hoffman’s interface theory), proposing his work as a vital hermeneutic for understanding AI’s mythopoeic impulses.
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This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
