Too Numerous
ISBN: 9781613766804
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Massachusetts Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: American prose literature -- 21st century;

What does it really mean when people are viewed as bytes of data? And is there beauty or an imaginative potential to information culture and the databases cataloging it? As Too Numerous reveals, the raw material of bytes and data points can be reshaped and repurposed for ridiculous, melancholic, and even aesthetic purposes.

Grappling with an information culture that is both intimidating and daunting, Kent Shaw considers the impersonality represented by the continuing accumulation of personal information and the felicities--and barriers--that result: "The us that was inside us was magnificent structures. And they weren't going to grow any larger."

KENT SHAW is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and author of Calenture , winner of the 2007 Tampa Review Prize. His poems have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review , and Witness .

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