Monday, September 25, 2006
Reading computationally expressed poetry
As computationally generated texts get better (and they are), at some point we have to begin thinking about an appropriate critical response. Just how does a critic engage with a non-authored text? What constitutes quality in an ALG text? What shape should this incipient tradition take? Who gets membership? Who gets shunned? How will we know which texts by which machines get to be included in anthologies? Who gets to decide? For that matter how is it to be decided (excellent evasive use of the passive voice there--there's hopes I can yet get to the humanities table) which texts make it into the academy as line items in syllabi?
Of course with no author to belittle, the critics job becomes ever so slightly harder: Pretty hard to deconstruct something that can't even know what the logos is. Or to psychoanalyze the hidden symbols belching from the machine whose mother, the math of the chip, must remain forever uncastrated. Or to show how mechanical texts are exemplifications of a a male dominated social system and thus instruments of rape. Or how the machine makes manifest the commodification of the arts, falling down hard on the capital side of the class struggle (actually, you might be able to make that particular case--I bet someone will try).
I would almost bet next month's salary that ALG will resurrect an interest in reader response criticism. We better get ready. A great place to start is with Norman Holland, the original reader-response guy, if for no other reason than this little snippet from one of his early essays, "Re-Covering 'The Purloined Letter,'" in The Purloined Poe, pp 310-311, in a paragraph engaging Marie Bonaparte's ( a student of Freud's) analysis of "The Purloined Letter":
"The struggle between Dupin and the Minister D-------- is an oedipal struggle between father and son, but of a very archaic kind, a struggle to seize not the mother in her entirety but only her penis, only a part therefore. A Bone-a-part, I suppose."
You just gotta love a guy like that.
# posted by Jim @ 12:19 PM 
