Walter Mitty

In this course

Walter Mitty exemplifies the gap between actual and imagined identity, a tension the course uses to explore how consciousness operates under constraint and desire. The readings invoke Mitty's daydreaming as evidence that humans naturally partition their selfhood into performed (social) and fantasized (interior) modes, a framework the course extends to understand how AI systems and cybernetic feedback loops similarly generate multiple versions of agency. His character serves as a pre-digital analogue for understanding identity play and simulation—the capacity to run parallel lives in imagination—that becomes literalized in algorithmic systems.

Background

Walter Jackson Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and in book form in My World—and Welcome to It in 1942.

Mentioned in 1 reading