Chance Operations and Randomizers in Avant-garde and Electronic Poetry: Tying Media to Language

Abstract

This article explores and compares the use of chance procedures and randomizers in Dada, Surrealism, Russian Futurism, and contemporary electronic poetry. I analyze the role of materiality of media in creating unexpected literary outcomes through a discussion of Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Katherine Hayles’s concept of computation as symptom.