Cybernetic aesthetics : modernist networks of information and data / Heather A. Love.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Love, Heather Allison, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cybernetics in literature.

Communication in literature.

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Literature--Aesthetics.

Literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 210 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Summary:

Cybernetic Aesthetics draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret the communication structures and reading strategies that modernist text cultivate. In doing so, Heather A. Love shows how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II; they flourished in the literature of modernism's most innovative authors. This book engages a range of literary authors, including Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and cybernetics theorists, such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Ross Ashby, Silvan Tomkins, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Mary Catherine Bateson. Through comparative analysis, Love uncovers cybernetics' relevance to modernism and articulates modernism's role in shaping the cultural conditions that produced not merely technological cybernetics, but also the more diffuse notion of cybernetic thinking that still exerts its influence today.

Contents:

Introduction : cybernetic thinking and modernist literature

Feedback loops and learning from the past : Erza Pound's poetics of transmission

The cybernetic information dialectic : patterns, randomness and newsreel in John Dos Passos's U.S.A.

Black box subjectivity : associative language, affect, and radio blindness in Virginia Woolf's The waves

Cultural composition, insistent spirals, and definition by contrast : Gertrude Stein as second-order cybernetic anthropologist

Coda : retrospective and prospective readings of cybernetic aesthetics.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Oct 2023).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781009387446 (ebook)

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.