"In Cybernetic Aesthetics, Heather A. Love makes a new contribution to ongoing debates about modern communication networks and information culture. This book draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret experimental modernist texts, illustrating how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II"--

Heather A. Love is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her work on modernist literature and on the cultural and intellectual history of cybernetics has appeared in Modernism/ modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, and New Literary History as well as the more tech-focused IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

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.