Abstract

At a time when projects such as digital poetry automatons suggest the increasingly realistic possibility of an artificial creation of literature it seems all the more indispensible to discuss the underlying tension between poetics and technology from a poetological point of view. In a broader sense, the concept of poetic machines has a long tradition in literature and applies to formal aspects (e.g. writing manuals and creativity applications) and matters of content (e.g. writing and reading androids and robots) likewise. They not only challenge and (di)versify the relation between man, machine and medium but, at the same time, address questions of authorship, the notion of a literary text and problems of reading. Hence I intend to elaborate on the intersection between discourses of art and discourses of the relation of man and machine in literary texts.