关键词: 控制论, 文学的机器化, 工具化, 实验化, 实体化

Abstract: Since the mid-twentieth century, cybernetics, with its core paradigms of information, system and feedback, has continuously intervened in the literary field and propelled the process of “the mechanization of literature.” This process mainly unfolds along three trajectories. Firstly, along the instrumentalization trajectory, cybernetics functioned as a theoretical meta-apparatus and entered literary studies via linguistics and anthropology, promoting systematic reflections on literary structures and mechanisms of meaning production. Secondly, along the experimentation trajectory, cybernetics was internalized as a methodology, giving rise to Oulipo’s constrained writing and the cybertexts studies, which endowed literary activities with the characteristics of being computable, operable, and executable. Thirdly, along the substantialization trajectory, with the development of text generators, especially generative artificial intelligence, cybernetics achieved technological implementation at the functional level, directly involving in the automated production of literary content. This process implies a transformation of literature from a humanistic domain of meaning expression into a complicated post-humanistic ecosystem, constituted by distributed agents, material media and recursive relations.

Key words: cybernetics, mechanization of literature, instrumentalization, experimentation, substantialization