UC Berkeley

My dissertation argues that mid-twentieth-century American poetry was part of a multi-disciplinary effort to renegotiate the traditional boundary between living beings and manufactured forms. I depart from the prevailing understanding that postwar American poetry reprises Romantic “organic form,” claiming to the contrary that postwar poets cast the literary text as an inorganic but nevertheless animate organization—an exteriorized correlate of the poet’s vital processes. Instead of invoking the analogy between organic life and textual form as a way of naturalizing literary production, postwar poets endeavored to extend the category of life to man-made forms. Their effort to animate the artificial space of the poetic text is, I contend, a major contribution to a central problem of the postwar decades: namely, how to rethink nature and technology, organism and machine as non-oppositional pairings. I explore this problem as it unfolded across different discursive and creative practices—from the trans-disciplinary science of cybernetics, which modeled machinic intelligence after recursive, biological processes (rather than the abstract, representational capacities of the mind) to the poetics of the Projectivist and New York schools, which reconstituted the temporalities and rhythms proper to bodily life as graphic-verbal patterns on paper. Throughout, I argue that American poets and scientists, far from representing two antithetical cultures, were mutually invested in modeling life inorganically, that is, in designing dynamic, self-organizing configurations, and thereby upending the Aristotelian conception of the technical object as matter devoid of self-formative power.