Autographic Crisis in Literature

Literature's autographic crisis is the structural instability that arises when the productive history of texts—traditionally transparent or explicitly credited—becomes opaque through AI collaboration. Goodman classified literature as allographic: the work's identity is determined by the text (the sequence of words), and any correct copy is a genuine instance of the work. It does not matter who typed the words. Hamlet printed on a laser printer is the same work as Hamlet set in 1623 movable type. But this classification assumed that productive history was either single-authored (one person wrote the sentences) or transparently collaborative (ghost-writers, editors, and co-authors were known contributors). AI collaboration produces a third category: texts where the boundary between human and machine contributions is invisible even to the human participant. The reader encounters a name on the cover and expects that name identifies the person who produced the sentences through the cognitive labor of writing. When the sentences were partially generated by AI, the expectation is violated—but the violation is undetectable from the published text. The