Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System

Abstract

This dissertation will present a mathematically informed interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of literature can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work’s ‘aesthetic meaning.’ Drawing on a generalization of ‘deep learning’ (“artificial intuition”) systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning – ‘ambient meaning’ – that may have a special resonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist literary criticism of the kind that critics like Sianne Ngai or Raymond Williams practice.