Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities

by Rachel Fountain Eames, John Holmes (Editor), Anton Kirchhofer (Editor), Janine Rogers (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350299825
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/09/2023
Series:	Explorations in Science and Literature
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Poetry and Physics
The Age of Revolutions: An Overview of Physics in the Period 1905-1945
Relativity Theory
The Emergence of Quanta
Visualizing the Atom
The Quantum Revolution
The New York Avant-Garde
Four New York Poets
Relative Measure: William Carlos Williams's Einsteinian Poetics
Cubist Poetics in Spring and All (1923)
Revising Relativity: The Second Version of 'St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils'
'The only reality that we can know is MEASURE': Einstein in Paterson
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 (1933-1936)
Back to the Bomb: Rethinking Atomic Dissolution 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': Order Through Science in the Baroness's Later Poetry
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

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher