Silicon Poetics: The Computer as Author and Artifice

This thesis explores how various computer programs construct poems and addresses the way several critics respond to these computer generated texts. Surprisingly, little attention has heretofore been paid to these programs. Critics who have given the matter attention usually focus on only one of the myriad programs available, and more often than not, such scholarship concludes with a disparagement of all such projects. My work reexamines computer generated poetry on a larger scale than previously exists, positing some conclusions about how these texts affect contemporary theories of authorship and poetic meaning. My first chapter explicates the historical debate over the use and limits of technology in the generation of text, studying similitudes between certain artistic movements and computer poetry. This historical background reveals that the concept of mechanically generated text is nothing new. My second chapter delineates how the two main families of computer poetry programs actually create these texts. Computer programs combine existing input text, aleatory functions, and semantic catalogues, which provides insight into how humans both create and interact with these programs. At the same time, this study illustrates the difficulty in defining the level of intention and influence by individuals on the textual product, and therefore these texts challenge our traditional notions of authorship and the value of poetry. My third and final chapter argues that contemporary literary theory and poetics creates the conditions under which computer generated poetry can pose as a human product. The success of these programs to deceive readers about the origins of the text becomes clearer with the results of a survey I conducted in which the respondents were fooled by the machine more often than not. This possibility of machine-created text masquerading as human art threatens many critics, who quickly dismiss the process and its results as non-poetic, but I conclude that since the computer complicates foreknowledge of origin in some contemporary poetic forms, this intrusion by the machine prompts us to reconsider how we traditionally value and interpret poetry.