Carl von Weizsäcker analyzes the information concept in the framework of his own philosophy. He emphasizes, on the one hand, the irreversibility inherent in the time structure and, on the other hand, the dependence of information on temporal relations. In his view, information constitutes an abstract, albeit real, element of the world related to the form, structure, and order. Its quantitative and dynamical character assimilates it to matter and energy. Information does not exist outside material processes and human consciousness. Its dynamical aspect is strictly connected with communication, and evolutionary and entropic processes. In Weizsäcker's view, information becomes a philosophical concept. His approach hardly could be regarded as a full theory of time and information; it is rather an attempt at grasping their mutual dependencies and meaning.
The present survey, which focuses on selected methods of quantitative corpus analysis applied to literary texts, asks to what extent it is useful to employ quantification and statistics in literary studies. The study discusses two basic ways in which quantitative corpus methods might be utilized. The first of these is macroanalysis, a method employing research into a large base of material. Its results provide empirical data about the macrostructural behaviour of predominantly the developmental tendencies and characteristics of a given literary category. The second is microanalysis, which focuses on smaller textual units, for instance, a group of texts by the same author. Its aim is to analyze empirically structural patterns within these texts. The research questions posed in studies using both methods include issues related to theme, authorship, narrative discourse, or gender. The study stresses the importance of employing these methods critically. Quantification must always be accompanied by relevant interpretation, based on appropriate methods of literary criticism.
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.
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