Textmaschinen

In this book, Timo Sestu examines literary artefacts of the European neo-avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s that originated as a result of the interaction between man and machine. These machines are both computers and technical apparatuses, but also book structures and forms of poetic formalism that organise text in a machine-like way.
The works by Nanni Balestrini, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Pastior and Raymond Queneau that are analysed in this book are outstanding documents of the early phase of digitalisation, but have hardly ever been read thoroughly. This dissertation provides evidence of their (hermeneutic) readability and focuses on the specific materiality of these texts, books and machines.