Cybernetic Aesthetics
Modernist Networks of Information and Data

This book shows that modernist literature creatively negotiated the same issues of data processing that cybernetics technologies would later tackle.

Heather A. Love (Author)

9781009387484, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 2023

224 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'… a bold and original approach … a deft attempt to put the theories of cybernetics back into circulation as ideas that bear on the aesthetic strategies of modernist literature.' Timothy Wientzen, Modern Philology

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.

Introduction: Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature
1. Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past: Ezra Pound's Poetics of Transmission
2. The Cybernetic Information Dialectic: Patterns, Randomness and Newsreel in John Dos Passos's USA
3. Black Box Subjectivity: Associative Language, Affect, and Radio Blindness in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
4. Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Definition by Contrast: Gertrude Stein as Second-Order Cybernetic Anthropologist
Coda: Retrospective and Prospective Readings of Cybernetic Aesthetics.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]