Informační moment v literární teorii a české experimentální poezii 60. let

This study aims to reconstruct the impact of information theory (and cybernetics) on literary theory (semiotics) during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the directions in which the same paradigm came to inspire 1960s Czech experimental poetry. Given the limitations of information theory vis-à-vis some crucial questions of communication, what was the foundation of this inspiration? The first part of the study concentrates on various important modifications of the paradigm in the context of information aesthetics (Max Bense), information poetics (Umberto Eco) and structuralist literary theory (Miroslav Červenka). The second part explores the position of the ‘information’ current within the context of 1960s Czech experimental poetry, including its avant-garde antecedents. The third part focuses on the experimental texts of Zdeněk Barborka, whose work is notable for being situated at the crossroads of several different tendencies. Finally, the study raises the question concerning the deeper implications of the ‘information moment’, with the suggestion that they might be found in the context of the development of media (communication) technologies as well as the genealogy of the media discourse, which emerges at this ‘moment’ from its prehistory to enter into its actual historical phase.