Physics and the modernist avant-garde : quantum modernisms and modernist relativities / Rachel Fountain Eames.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fountain Eames, Rachel, author.

Series:

Explorations in Science and Literature.

Explorations in Science and Literature

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (273 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

System Details:

text file

HTML/PDF

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Poetry and physics

The age of revolutions: An overview of physics in the period 1905-45

Relativity theory

The emergence of quanta

Visualizing the atom

The quantum revolution

The New York avant-garde

Four New York poets

1 Relative measure: William Carlos Williams's Einsteinian poetics

Cubist poetics in Spring and All (1923)

Complex mathematics: Williams encounters Einstein

Revising relativity: The second version of 'St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils'

'The only reality that we can know is MEASURE': Einstein in Paterson

2 Mina Loy's energy physics

Parody physics: Loy's futurist satires

Physics without parody: 'Parturition' (1914)

Loy's atomic spiritualism

The man of electric vitality: Insel (1933-6)

Back to the bomb: Rethinking atomic dissolution

3 The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven's physical systems

Dada's cult of indeterminacy

Smashing Duchamp's glass: The Baroness against the Dada scientists

Quantum dissolution in Weimar Berlin

'Life is science': Finding order through science

4 The quantum poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck

The visualizability question and the poetic image

The image in superposition: Stevens and Surrealism

Stevens's phantom problem

'Invisible or visible or both': An abstracted poetics

Conclusion

Appendix 1 - Parallel timeline

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-350-29984-7

1-350-29985-5

1-350-29983-9

OCLC:

1369669614