Programming Literature

Abstract This is a book about the messy, archival worlds of literature and computing, and the myriad of relations that have existed between the two. Before J. M. Coetzee was a writer of Nobel Prize–winning novels, the South African was a programmer for one of the most significant Cold War supercomputer projects in Britain. Experimental British writer Christine Brooke-Rose worked at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. When not opining about modernism, Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner was a devoted computer hobbyist. Literary scholars have often not known what to make of these ‘other careers’: intimidating, irrelevant, outside of the scope of literary studies, surely? When they do make links, it is often via the frame of formal logic that has dominated discussions of both computer history and literary modernism. In this book I start from a different assumption: that, far from irrelevant, these material experiences were significant in the development of the literary projects of ‘difficulty’ writers J. M. Coetzee, Christine Brooke-Rose, Hugh Kenner, Kamau Brathwaite, and William Gaddis. The book contends that it is in the practice and the archive, rather than on the plane of abstraction and the universal machine, that we can best see this influence. Addressing literary scholars, book and computer historians, media archaeologists, and digital theorists alike, the book reframes contemporary debates around artificial intelligence, the value of the humanities, and tech culture by emphasizing just how material these worlds have always been.