The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts INFORMATIONAL PRACTICES IN GERMAN POETRY: ERNST MEISTER, OSWALD EGGER, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB KLOPSTOCK A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Lea Pao © 2017 Lea Pao Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2017 The dissertation of Lea Pao was reviewed and approved* by the following: Jonathan E. Abel Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies Dissertation Co-Adviser Co-Chair of Committee Samuel Frederick Associate Professor of German Dissertation Co-Adviser Co-Chair of Committee Daniel Purdy Professor of German Shuang Shen Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies Michele Kennerly Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Head of the Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses the ways in which the emergence of technological media and information theory has altered the place of poetry in the realm of human communication. Against claims that would see poetry as fundamentally opposed to information, I propose a reading of poetry as information and a counter-theory of information as a poetic practice. In three successive chapters, each on a distinct practice of the “information triangle” (storage, transmission, organization) and its poetic analogies (memory, communication, grammar), I develop such a practice through three figures that bridge the gap between the seemingly informational on the one side and the poetic on the other: Haltsamkeit, Mitteilung, and Mitausdruck. My major examples are from German-language poetry (Meister, Egger, Klopstock), with minor examples from English and Greek. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES V INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1, STORAGE : MEMORY 18 1. Feats of Memory: Homer’s Formulae of Memory 18 2. Artifacts of Care: Eduard Mörike’s Recovered Objects 28 3. Books of the Dead: William Gibson’s Storage Media 41 4. Lengths of Space: Ernst Meister’s Poetics of Containment 48 5. To Last, at Last 68 CHAPTER 2, TRANSMISSION : MITTEILUNG 73 1. The Silent Messenger 74 2. Communication, Direct and Indirect 78 3. Sharing is Caring 88 4. The Messenger Gene: Christian Bök’s Xenotext 97 5. Semantic Clouds: Oswald Egger’s Nichts, das ist 108 CHAPTER 3, ORGANIZATION : FORM 126 1. Grammar as Form 126 2. Klopstock’s Poetic Vocabulary 130 3. The Ear and the Eye 141 4. Utopia of Grammar 151 5. Between Information and Information 166 CODA 170 BIBLIOGRAPHY 172 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Oswald Egger, Nichts das ist 119 v Introduction “Only a fool reads poetry for facts.” –Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel An Opposition For readers of poetry, there is profound truth to these aphoristic admonitions: a poem, we are inclined to agree, mandates a different attention from the fact-seeking requirements of a dictionary, a newspaper article, or a recipe. Poems are not for facts; nor are they for giving information, even when they appear to be (do not be that fool!) or when they are composed in the same information-giving language we would find in a text full of facts. Indeed, if we believe Wittgenstein, a poem demands special attention from its reader not because it denies the language of information, but because it persistently differentiates itself from it. Persistence, that is, in not being reducible to fact or information, in presenting itself, rather, as irreducible to its smaller units, the singularity of a piece of information, or the integrity of a fact. Poetry’s claim on such irreducibility has perhaps never seemed less true or less urgent than in an era named for its orientation towards the reduction, simplification, and efficiency of communication: the age of information. One seismographic indicator of the age of information and 1 poetry’s place in it, Wittgenstein’s axiom provides a guiding line along which the distinctively different tasks of poetry and information (and its related activities) unfold. In recent scholarship on modern poetics it serves as marker of poetry’s antagonistic relationship to information’s different “language-game.” Jahan Ramazani, for example, writes “if we take our cues from Wittgenstein and Benjamin […], one approach to the impossibly general question we began with, ‘what is poetry?,’ is an almost equally general answer: under modernity, poetry is what is by virtue of not being the news.”1 Marjorie Perloff, advancing a Wittgensteinian poetics, emphasizes poetry’s engagement with information as a modern aesthetic practice that emerges with poetry’s “literal and spare” display of an “obsession with the uses of ordinary language.”2 Poetry does not exclude information from poetic discourse, she argues; rather poetry’s alliance with its opposite produces a certain kind of poetics within the boundaries of the general Wittgensteinian binary.3 Similarly, Veronika Forrest- Thompson refers to Wittgenstein’s aphorism at the beginning of Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, using it to point us to the work of the poem: “Every reader of poetry knows that statements are changed by their insertion in a poem, that they no longer mean what they would mean in ordinary speech.”4 A line about eating the last plums in the refrigerator, for example, has very different effects depending on whether we read it on a note attached to that appliance or in a poem. To understand how a poem works, Forrest-Thompson says, we have to understand the poem’s organization of thought and imagination as a poetic task “free from the fixed forms ordinary language imposes on 1 Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others, 66. 2 Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 117, 185. 3 The difference has been expressed in a number of different ways: as the result of a distinction between the “poetic” and “referential” (Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 357.) between the “emotive” and “referential” functions of language (Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism.), between “moral” and “empirical” (on one hand) or “factual” statements (on the other) (Eagleton, How to Read a Poem, 27.). Each of these contrasts recognizes that our uses of language, our verbal modes of organizing, directing, and communicating words, are what separates poetry from facts. The distinction between these opposites can also be expressed in the language of older, more general distinctions between two antithetical epistemological cultures as a contrast between “mood” and “proof” (C. P. Snow), “entertaining” and “didactic” purposes (Aristotle, Horace, Brecht), “aesthetic” and “practical” judgments (Kant), or “intuitive” or “logical” knowledge (Croce)—or, for that matter, in the language of the many debates around and attempted dissolutions of these distinctions. 4 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, x. 2 our minds,” as a task that affirms that a poem’s and information’s language-games are not the same.5 Yes: to recognize “the difference of literary from informational discourse”6 means to know that reading a poem and reading the news, a recipe, or a telephone book require certain kinds of attention and even knowledge. Only a fool reads poems for facts.7 To read a poem unfoolishly, then, is to hear this plea and not turn to the poem for factual knowledge; to remember that “facts in poetry are primarily factitious”8; and to value poetry’s “subtle interplay of sight and sound” over the news’ “immediate cognitive gratification.”9 Whatever exactly language’s “poetic” and “informational” capacities are, they can be provisionally defined as an opposition that establishes poetry’s purpose (not to provide facts), outlines its particularity as a genre (to take part in its own language-game), or adumbrates its specific demands on the reader (to recognize subtlety). To be sure, poetry has long been the site where questions of language and the social are intensified and negotiated—including questions about the difference between everyday language and poetic expression, between form and content, representation and truth, saying and being. The idea that poetry is a special kind of language, opposed in some way to ordinary language, is not new. But that longstanding opposition takes a particular form in the twentieth century, when the concept of “information” sees a dramatic rise in critical and cultural prestige, a rise fueled, of course, by the rise of electrical and computational media and information technologies, including digital computers. A History of Information This digital age, the age of propelling, modernizing, and transforming communication and knowledge processes, organizes itself around an inconspicuous term that at once means nothing in 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others, 66. 7 Tiffany’s work on scientific metaphors in lyric poetry and Ramazani’s work on poetry’s dialogic engagement with the very genres it differentiates itself from (contra Jakobson) both offer ways to undermined this distinction rather than leaving it uncontested. 8 Bernstein, Poetics, 9. 9 Wachtel, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry, 2. 3 particular and potentially everything: information. The so-called age of information, that is, gets its name from a term so versatile that no one exactly knows what it is, how it behaves, or what it describes. Driven by the technological and computational possibilities to reorganize the epistemological order of this new era, many quickly recognized (or in some cases perhaps intuited) that in information’s inconspicuous versatility lies a great power, and with such power the promise to revolutionize the fields of human interaction and communication for ages to come. Among them, Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener, who, at the historical “knot” of these developments in the early twentieth century, formulated a mathematical theory of communication, a theory of information that would dominate any effort to define what information is for the rest of the century and until today.