The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. by Paul Stephens (review)

That the title of Paul Stephens's first monograph includes the words "overload" and "Gertrude Stein" is fitting, as Stein seems to be at the center of many recent studies of experimental writing. This omnipresence may result from the sheer volume of Stein's work, which makes for fertile subject matter given recent shifts away from criticism based on close reading and toward that which unearths, describes, or promotes; it also reminds us that Stephens's topic—modernist and contemporary American poetry's anticipation and reflection of technological change as well as the information glut that defines our everyday lives—is more relevant now than ever before. Despite the vogue of such topics, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing makes an argument that is timely without being trendy.

These strengths result from Stephens's measured argument and circumspect demarcation of his area of focus. He concedes that avant-garde poetry "may have [only] a small role to play in our understanding of global information flows" and that avant-garde attempts at remaining apart from mainstream values "may be grandiose and hyperbolic" (xv). Nevertheless, he convincingly articulates a subtle yet fundamental connection between a historical avant-garde and present-day information saturation, arguing that much of this poetry has been "concerned with technologies of communication, data storage, and bureaucratic control," "adopting and commenting on" these technologies rather than rejecting them. This premise sets up two related arguments: first, that works often described as "non-referential" or "unreadable" were tapped into this relationship between poetry and technological change (1); and, consequently, that poetry itself not only is far from archaic, but, in being specially poised to grapple with such technological change, will "long outlast our current media platforms" (xvi). Despite the technological novelty that is its subject, The Poetics of Information Overload is a fairly traditional, theoretically rigorous scholarly monograph; its mutually reinforcing arguments never, for instance, veer into Digital Humanities-style emphases on new possibilities for the dissemination or exposition of texts.

Stephens claims he is the first to address this particular configuration of topics, but The Poetics of Information Overload is not without precedents. It at several points quotes Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), a study that, aside from its now-dated introductory passages, situates itself in a manner remarkably similar to Stephens's opening concessions and connections ("the impact of electronic technology on our lives is now the object of intense study," Perloff wrote then; "but what remains obscure is the role, if any, this technology has in shaping the ostensibly private language of poetry" [2–3]). Stephens acknowledges that art historians have long been addressing such topics, and, like Kenneth Goldsmith and others, he integrates that discussion with literary criticism. His conclusion that the avant-garde anticipates digital-age engagements with information glut is similar to those of Stephen Voyce and others, but here it is the central concern rather than a peripheral observation. Meanwhile, the afterword's reading of Robert Grenier's typographical poetics in the context of Craig Dworkin's No Medium (2013) locates Stephens's monograph among recent studies that focus on the circumstances of the avant-garde text's production, dissemination, and reception, as opposed to the work itself.

Stephens looks at Pound and Eliot for historical context, asking whether The Cantos and The Waste Land can be read as instances of sampling or data compression. He sheds light on this dynamic while also acknowledging that it cannot be read in isolation from the authors' other concerns; his brisk movement from High Modernists to Queneau and the Oulipo is convincing precisely because of this reluctance to position his own topic as the central preoccupation of such figures. Less convincing is his distinction between today's avant-garde and mainstream poetry (the latter of which sometimes seems to be a designator that is maintained solely to reify the...