Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York.
This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.
Arvustused
In a book that manages to provide lucid explanations of complex physics concepts, Eames traces a wide range of different paths by which the developments in physics and art in the early twentieth century influenced each other. Filled to the brim with entertaining anecdotes about the various authors and their shocking lives, the text is at its strongest in its ability to highlight the tangential roads of influence between various art movements and developments in physics. * The Modernist Review * Eamess book constitutes a necessary complement to the interdisciplinary studies of modernism and science as well as an insightful reflection on the history of science. * Isis *
Muu info
An interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural and artistic reception of the 'new physics' as it emerged through the writing and visual art of avant-gardes in early 20th-century New York.
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ix | |
| Acknowledgements |
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| Introduction |
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1 | (38) |
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5 | (4) |
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The age of revolutions: An overview of physics in the period 1905--45 |
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9 | (1) |
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10 | (4) |
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14 | (1) |
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15 | (2) |
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17 | (6) |
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23 | (7) |
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30 | (9) |
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1 Relative measure: William Carlos Williams's Einsteinian poetics |
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39 | (36) |
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Cubist poetics in Spring and All (1923) |
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43 | (11) |
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Complex mathematics: Williams encounters Einstein |
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54 | (9) |
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Revising relativity: The second version of `St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils' |
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63 | (7) |
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"The only reality that we can know is MEASURE': Einstein in Paterson |
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70 | (5) |
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2 Mina Loy's energy physics |
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75 | (56) |
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Parody physics: Loy's futurist satires |
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80 | (14) |
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Physics without parody: `Parturition' (1914) |
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94 | (13) |
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Loy's atomic spiritualism |
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107 | (11) |
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The man of electric vitality: Insel (1933--6) |
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118 | (8) |
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Back to the bomb: Rethinking atomic dissolution |
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126 | (5) |
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3 The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven's physical systems |
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131 | (48) |
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Dada's cult of indeterminacy |
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133 | (12) |
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Smashing Duchamp's glass: The Baroness against the Dada scientists |
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145 | (7) |
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Quantum dissolution in Weimar Berlin |
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152 | (10) |
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`Life is science': Finding order through science |
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162 | (17) |
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4 The quantum poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck |
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179 | (46) |
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The visualizability question and the poetic image |
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184 | (12) |
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The image in superposition: Stevens and Surrealism |
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196 | (9) |
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Stevens's phantom problem |
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205 | (8) |
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`Invisible or visible or both': An abstracted poetics |
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213 | (12) |
| Conclusion |
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225 | (7) |
| Appendix 1 Parallel timeline |
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232 | (3) |
| Bibliography |
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235 | (14) |
| Index |
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249 | |
Rachel Fountain Eames is an academic and creative writer who holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, as has published work on 19th- and 20th-century literature, modern visual art, and science. She can be found on Twitter @rfeames.
