As I’ve mentioned many times on the blog, meaning is a very fluid concept in literature. This fact inspired me to see what happens when we completely distort the author’s original intention, while still maintaining some minimal cohesion. This JavaScript poem shuffler was the result.
As the name perhaps implies, my JavaScript poem shuffler takes a poem and randomly reorganizes its lines.
Now, you might have two questions about this:
- Doesn’t that render the poem meaningless?
- Why should we care?
Amazingly, both these questions have the same answer, as we’ll see in more detail. Briefly, let me just say that this little coding exercise also provides us with excellent teaching material in terms of affective power and, indeed, the creation of meaning in literature.
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