Coda

Summary

The Coda pushes the implications of the book’s argument both backward and forward in time. Love reads Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes as a nineteenth-century precursor to the cybernetic impulses of data-collection and data-processing, and points to the growing body of criticism that is probing the historical parameters of cybernetic thinking even further back in time. Love proposes that the emerging sense of a literary–critical cybernetic paradigm is particularly significant to scholars of modernism in light of the field’s recent global turn. Finally, she illustrates how the cybernetic reading of modernist formal experimentation can both illuminate and offer aesthetic alternatives to contemporary technological debates surrounding issues like surveillance and privacy. This conclusion drives home the argument that modernist literature can help us understand the longer and more diverse cultural history of our present-day, information-rich world; it also gestures to new possibilities for research and analysis that might push our awareness of cybernetic thinking back even further into earlier cultural moments, movements, genres, and texts.