Real Language: Cybernetics and Transatlantic Romanticism

This dissertation explores the relationship between the origins of Romanticism in England and the United States through the lens of the twentieth-century science of cybernetics, as formulated by Norbert Wiener in his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1952) and developed by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). A tracing of an intellectual filiation, “Real Language” looks specifically at the revolutionary poetic project of Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads and its effort at programmatically reforming culture by means of the reorientation of received attitudes towards poetic language as an example of a cybernetic process operating through feedback. The dissertation then moves to a consideration of the psychological concept of “the uncanny” as developed by Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jentsch and how this concept complicates the ideas of cybernetics articulated by Wiener and provides a means of interpreting Wordsworth’s poems of encounter. Following this, “Real Language” moves to the context of the early United States, situating the nationalistic project of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, specifically his treatment of indigenous American subjects, in cybernetic terms, with special attention paid to the larger conception of “mind” Longfellow attributes to his native subjects. Finally, the dissertation concludes with an exploration of Emerson, focusing on his series of essays, looking at the ways his vision of the interplay between empirical and idealist (or “mystical”) perspectives on the world combine in an ongoing process of feedback that anticipates the cybernetic visions of both Wiener and Bateson.