Paul Jaussen is an associate professor of literature at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI, where he chairs the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication. His teaching and research focus on modern and contemporary literature, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. He is the author of Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and, with Mary Balkun and Jeffrey Gray, an editor of A Companion to American Poetry, which was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2022. His recent work includes an essay on systems theory and literary form for a special cluster on literary cybernetics, published by New Literary History, and an article on contemporary poetry’s forensic aesthetics that recently appeared in Criticism. He is currently completing a second book, tentatively entitled The Art of Breaking Worlds: On Contemporary Poetry and Public Language.
Paul Jaussen
Contributions
Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data by Heather A. Love
What is it like to write within a fold? Heather A. Love’s engaging new study argues that canonical modernist literature bends into a cybernetic future. Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s transhistorical notion of the “cybernetic fold,” Love asks us to consider modernism as an art of informatics, data sets, entangled human-machines, and dynamic feedback loops, well before such notions had become self-consciously articulated. Combining both media and information theory, her book expands Bernard Scott’s claim that “cybernetics came into being before it had a nam