SOURCE: "Cybernetic Fiction and Postmodern Science," in New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter, 1989, pp. 373-96.

In the following essay, Porush analyzes the place of cybernetics—in which both humans and machines are viewed as systems of information—in postmodern fiction.

The poem is a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.

Paul Valéry, Literature

And so the author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works.

Italo Calvino, "Cybernetics and Ghosts"

I can no longer accept any situation other than this transformation of ourselves into the messages of ourselves.

Italo Calvino, T-Zero

For the first time in the long and fruitful relationship between literature and science, literature actually has the means to meet science on its...