The poetics of information overload : from Gertrude Stein to conceptual writing / Paul Stephens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stephens, Paul, 1974- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

American poetry--21st century--History and criticism.

Poetry, Modern--History and criticism.

Poetry, Modern.

Literature and technology.

Poetics.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

United States.

Information technology in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xvi, 240 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2015]

Summary:

Information overload is a subject of vital, ubiquitous concern in our time. The Poetics of information Overload reveals a fascinating genealogy of information saturation through the literary lens of American modernism. Although technology has typically been viewed as hostile or foreign to poetry, Paul Stephens outlines a countertradition within twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in which avant-garde poets are centrally involved with technologies of communication, data storage, and bureaucratic control. Beginning with Gertrude Stein, Stephens explores how writers have been preoccupied with the effects of new media since the advent of modernism. He continues with the postwar writing of Chark Olson, John Cage, Bern Porter, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews, and concludes with a discussion of conceptual writing produced in the past decade. By reading these works in the context of information systems, Stephens shows how the poetry of the past century has had, as a primary focus, the role of data in human life. Book jacket.

Contents:

"Reading at it": Gertrude Stein, information overload, and the makings of Americanitis

Bob Brown, "inforg": the "readies" at the limits of modernist cosmopolitanism

Human university: Charles Olson and the embodiment of information

"When information rubs/against information": poetry and informatics in the expanded field in the 1960s

Paradise and informatics: Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and the posthuman adamic

Vanguard total index: conceptual writing, information asymmetry, and the data glut.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816694396

0816694397

9780816694419

0816694419

OCLC:

885377981