Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology

Massey, Irving

doi:10.26818/9780814213797

Cited by 3 publications

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“…At the same time, the “vehicle” (to use I. A. Richards’s term) is always struggling for independence (Massey 2018 : 49–51). Again, I will leave that issue aside, like the others, mentioned but not fully engaged with, perhaps to be addressed in another life.…”

Section: Poetry and Nonsensementioning

confidence: 99%

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A new Turing test: metaphor vs. nonsense

Massey

2021

AI & Soc

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My basic argument is that a computer cannot distinguish between metaphor and nonsense. This would be my new "Turing Test." I was very fond of a particular Italian poem, but I was told by an Italian friend that it was a hackneyed poem of little worth. I then taught myself to experience the poem alternately, as real poetry and as the silly nonsense that my friend claimed it really was. Having done so, I realized that I could do the same with any metaphor, such as "having a green thumb." Thinking about the nature of this switch, from the literal to the metaphorical, I also realized that it was the sort of change that could not be prescribed or even described: this, the basic aesthetic gesture, remains beyond the boundary of logical definition. It then dawned on me that it might provide a test for the validity of a "Turing Test," by any definition. Can a computer track a mind as it goes through this transformation? I could not envisage such a possibility. This would be a "Turing Test" based on the discipline of aesthetics rather than on technology. It may even be argued that the ability to experience metaphor is the very definition of the human.

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Section: Poetry and Nonsensementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1 Among the many works on metaphor, see especially Aristotle ( 1996 ), Black ( 1962 ), Lakoff and Johnson ( 2003 ); Massey ( 2018 ) (see pp. 46–48 for some more recent titles on theory of metaphor); Richards ( 1936 ), Vico ( 1961 ), Whorf ( 1956 ), Zanker ( 2016 : 164–190).…”

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A new Turing test: metaphor vs. nonsense

Massey

2021

AI & Soc

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A Shared Passion for Nonsense: Laura E. Richards and Margaret Atwood

Keck

2024

ejas

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This article opens up a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between the two North American women authors Laura E. Richards and Margaret Atwood regarding their shared passion for literary nonsense. I argue that reading Richards’s and Atwood’s nonsense alongside each other highlights the continuity of nonsense’s characteristic duality of subversion and dominance as well as the ongoing social and sexual violence that surrounds their young female protagonists, whose (sexual) agency challenges constructions of “childhood innocence.” Yet where Richards purportedly relates her children’s poetry to the domestic sphere as the proper site to express nonsense and wields it as a creative educational practice, Atwood’s fiction self-reflectively insists that nonsense constitutes a powerful political instrument and weapon in and beyond the nursery.

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The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2018

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2020

Studies in American Humor

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Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

A new Turing test: metaphor vs. nonsense

A new Turing test: metaphor vs. nonsense

A Shared Passion for Nonsense: Laura E. Richards and Margaret Atwood

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2018

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