Amittai F. Aviram

1012 Chapel Street
Apt. 210
New Haven, CT 06510
USA

++1 646 483 2639
amittai dot aviram at yale dot edu

Welcome to my website! The diversity of material here reflects my ongoing career change. From 1984 to 2004, I was a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina, but, since 2000, I have been making the transition into computer science. In spring 2006, I finished a second undergraduate degree at my original alma mater, Columbia University, through its School of General Studies: a BS in Computer Science. At Columbia, I got to study with such luminaries and superb professors as Alfred Aho, Joseph Traub, and Jonathan Gross. I am now a PhD student in Computer Science at Yale University (where I got my first PhD in English in 1984), hoping to specialize in programming languages and methods. I am especially interested in developing better technology and tools to help programmers to understand the big and complicated software projects that they work on.

The Prose section has links to several of my academic essays on poetry and philosophy, which represent my main intellectual project while a literature professor: to define the difference between fiction and nonfiction (with poetry as a kind of fiction) and the consequences of that distinction to education and society. A poem is never a message, hidden or otherwise, but a game of imitating messages. Indeed, no work of art is ever a message, though it may well play games with the stuff of messages. The life of the poet or artist has nothing to do with our appreciation of his or her works. Inquiring into the creator's life leads us away from a genuinely artistic experience and thus violates the creator's intention. An artist's biography may be useful only as an inspiring story of achievement.

Also posted are many of my poems. Although I have had several of my poems published in conventional print and online venues, my enthusiasm for the "poetry business" is hardly fervid, and I am grateful for the technology that enables me to make these poems available to anybody who might happen to enjoy them. Giving pleasure is what poetry and the other arts are all about. The rest is nonsense.

Feel free to make comments.