Date of Award
5-1-2012
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Netzley, Ryan
Abstract
The poetry of George Herbert asks its readers to seriously engage with the visual aspects of how information is arranged, and this prompts a style of reading that depends more on how space is utilized rather than the semantics of the word sequences. Though his use of space, Herbert develops of form of simultaneity that gives his readers a conception of a non-reducible whole. This project begins with a spatial reading of four of Herbert's poems: "The H. Scriptures II," "Coloss. 3.3," "The Water-Course," and "Deniall," then moves into a reading that depends on quantum information theory. Quantum information theory, in the form of the qubit, provides a concise language for Herbert's simultaneity and his conception of the whole.
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