Ashbery’s Aesthetics of Difficulty: Information Theory and Hypertext
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This paper is concerned with John Ashbery’s poetics of difficulty,questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as ‘information’ to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery’s poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but ‘selected’and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery’s poetry, disruptive ‘noise’elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery’s poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery’s idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium ‘information technology’ has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery’s poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery’s poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.
Abstract
This paper is concerned with John Ashbery’s poetics of difficulty,questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as ‘information’ to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery’s poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but ‘selected’and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery’s poetry, disruptive ‘noise’elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery’s poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery’s idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium ‘information technology’ has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery’s poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery’s poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.
참고문헌 (34)
- Arnheim, Rudolf, "Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order" (1971), U of California P
- Ashbery, John, "As We Know" (1979), Viking
- Ashbery, John, "Collected Poems 1956-1987" (1987), The Library of America
- Ashbery, John, "Selected Poems of John Ashbery" (1985), Penguin Books
- Ashbery, John, "The Mooring of Starting Out" (1997), The Ecco Press
- Ashbery, John, "Three Poems" (1972), Viking
- Ashbery, John, "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987" (1991), Harvard UP
- Atlan, Henri, "On a Formal Definition of Organization", Journal of Theoretical Biology, 45, pp.295~304 (1974)
- Bloom, Harold, "The Charity of Hard Moments, In American Poetry Since 1960: Some Critical Perspectives" (1973), Carcanet Press
- Bolter, Jay D, "Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing" (1991), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers
- Chapeau Blondau, F, "Stochastic Resonance and the Benefit of Noise in Nonlinear Systems, In Noise, Oscillators and Algebrac Randomness From noise in Communication Systems to Number Theory", pp.137~155 (2000), Springer
- Costello, Bonnie, "John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader", Contemporary Literature, 23(4), pp.493~514
- Douglass, J.K, "Noise Enhancement of Information Transfer in Crayfish Mechanoreceptors by stochastic Rosonance", Nature, 365, pp.337~340 (1993)
- Floridi, Luciano, "Information: A Very Short Introduction" (2010), Oxford UP
- Hayles, N. Katherine, "Chaos Bound Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science" (1990), Cornell UP
- Keeling, John, "The Moment Unravels: Reding John Ashbery’s Litany’", Twentieth Century Literature, 38(2), pp.125~151 (1992)
- Koch, Stephen, "The New York School of Poets: The Serious at Play", The New York Times Book Review, ~ (1968)
- Mazur, Krystyna, "Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens" (2005), Routledge
- MeGavin, Lee H, "Creativity as Information: Measuring Aesthetic Attractions", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Science, 1(3), pp.203~226 (1997)
- Moles, Abraham A., "Information theory and esthetic perception" (1966), U of Illinois P
- Moss, F. Lawrence Ward, "Stochastic Resonance and Sensory Information Processing: a Tutorial and Review of Application", Clinical Neurophysiology, 115(2), pp.267~281 (2004)
- Nelson, T.H, "Literary Machines" (1981), Self published
- Packard, William, "The Poet’ craft: interviews from the New York Quarterly" (1987), Paragon House
- Paulson, William R, "The Noise of Culture: Literary Test in a World of Information" (1988), Cornell UP
- Perkins, David, "A History of Modern Poetry : Modernism and After" (1987), Harvard UP
- Perloff, Majorie, "Fragments of a Buried Life, In Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery", pp.66~86 (1980), Cornell UP
- Perloff, Majorie, "The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage" (1981), Princeton UP
- Ryoo, Gi Taek, "Technology and Literary Imagination: Williams and Ashbery", The Journal of English Language & Literature, 57(6), pp.151~171 (2011)
- Shannon, Claude E, "The Mathematical theory of Communication" (1998), U of Illinois P
- Stitt, Peter, "The Art of Poetry XXXIII: An Interview with John Ashbery", The Paris Review, 90, pp.31~59 (1983)
- Tosca, Susana P, "The Lyrical Quality of Links, In Hypertext ’99", pp.217~218 (1999), ACM
- White, Edmund, "Two Part Variations, in Book Word", ~ (1979)
- Vendler, Helen, "Soul Says: On Recent Poetry" (1995), Harvard UP
- Vendler, Helen., "The Music of What Happens" (1988), Harvard UP