Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition [Hardcover]

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory.

Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities  and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

Henry Sussmanis Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, USA.

Playful Intelligenceexemplifies the encouragement that interdisciplinary thinking can provide to critics who still believe in the salutary potential of humanistic endeavors. Journal of Modern Literature

There is, I think, nothing out there truly comparable toPlayful Intelligencein terms of focus, insight, scope, cross-disciplinary applicability, theoretical urgency, and learning. - Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, USA,American Book Review

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Reading Kandinsky
2. FromThe Brothers K.to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature
3. The Calculable, the Incalculable and the Rest: Kafka's Virtual Environment
4. Urban Introjections:Berlin Alexanderplatz
5. Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time
6. Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott
7. The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence
8. The Phenomenology of Jlã*