| This project investigates the twentieth century's burgeoning communication networks and information systems. I trace how modernist authors strived to make sense of the increasing amount of "data" in public circulation during the early decades of the twentieth-century. Their innovations with literary form, I argue, are imbricated in the same cultural contexts that gave rise to cybernetics---a techno-scientific field of high-speed, high-volume data processing that was officially codified as a discipline in 1948 by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener.;Cybernetics' relevance to late twentieth-century literature and culture is widely acknowledged. Histories of the discipline, however, tend stop at Wiener and his colleagues, positioning them as cybernetics' ultimate origin figures. This dissertation offers a foray into an earlier discursive context by demonstrating how modernist texts develop cybernetic strategies to tackle (and teach readers to tackle) the information-management issues that later cybernetics theorists would also address. Drawing from work by Wiener, Claude Shannon, W. Ross Ashby, and Silvan Tomkins, my chapters explore various cybernetic dimensions of modernist textuality: James Joyce's punning (con)fusion of human and machine, Ezra Pound's feedback-loop poetics, John Dos Passos randomly patterned information, and Virginia Woolf's black-box subjects.;As a whole, this project showcases how modernist literary works recognize, integrate, and process the increasingly daunting amount of information in cultural circulation. From this perspective, cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before Wiener experimented with prediction and statistics during World War II; they flourished in the literature of modernism's most innovative authors. By looking back in time to uncover cybernetics' relevance to modernism, and modernism's role in shaping cybernetics, this dissertation opens up new sites for interdisciplinary debate about the textual and technological networks that circulate within twentieth, and now twenty-first century culture. |
