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Date
2019-03-??
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英語學系
Department of English, NTNU
Department of English, NTNU
Abstract
Written during the Cold War, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop illuminates acultural moment when cybernetic imagery or cybernetic modes of thinkinginfiltrated social and political discourse and rhetoric. Bishop’s notion of poetry asportraying “a mind thinking” echoes the technological insights of “cybernetics”that sought to specify the ways in which human minds and machines operate.Cybernetic frameworks attune us to Bishop’s Cold War poetics and her artisticstrategies for communication in an increasingly technology-driven world. Thethematic and structural elements of Bishop’s work find a poetic means by whichto reactivate the socio-cultural dynamics of cybernetics science in the form ofaesthetic assimilation of and resistance to power and control. As a result, thecomplex social, cultural, and technological realities are made to interact with andshape each other within the artistic composition of Bishop’s poems. This paperdemonstrates how Bishop’s poems embody the self-reflective paradox ofcybernetics (both formative and transformative, and also both mechanical andself-organizing), which was deeply embedded within the socio-cultural dynamicsof the Cold War period.