Narrative Coherence and Distributed Authorship in Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1 the Road: A Comparative Case Study

Abstract

Generative text systems challenge established accounts of literary authorship, creative agency, and communicative intentionality. This qualitative comparative case study examines selected passages from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003) and Ross Goodwin’s 1 the Road (2018), an early sensor-driven LSTM experiment. Informed by computational creativity and posthumanist accounts of distributed cognition, the study compares the texts in relation to local cohesion, global narrative continuity, temporal and causal organisation, metaphorical patterning, and the distribution of creative agency across human and computational actors. The selected passages suggest that 1 the Road can produce locally fluent and occasionally striking combinations, but that its longer-range referential and narrative continuity differs substantially from the sustained plotting and thematic organisation of Orwell’s novel. At the same time, the production history of 1 the Road complicates any simple opposition between human and machine authorship: the system, training data, sensors, route, programmer, and decision not to post-edit all contribute to the published work. The comparison therefore does not establish a universal boundary between human and AI creativity. Rather, it offers a historically bounded account of how genre, editorial practice, model architecture, and production conditions shape literary coherence and authorship.