"entropy"

[Dave Monroe]

THUOHB, by the way, is namechecked by Pynchon in his
intro to Slow Learner.  Whilst Pynchon played no small
part in the process, I suspect he is only the
glaringly visible tip of an iceberg here, not in the
least for kicking around the term as explicitly as he
has ("Entropy," The Crying of Lot 49).  Samuel Beckett
(esp. The Lost Ones and "Breath," but much of the
entropic across that Beckettian oeuvre) comes to mind
as well, not to mention (and this of course is another
vector of no small importance in re: Pynchonian
entropy) The Edumacation of Henry Adams.  But think
also Gibbons' The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Spengler's The Decline of the West, Nordau's
Degerneration, Zamyatin's "On Literature, Revolution
and Entropy," Eliot's "The Waste-Land," Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby ...

Serving suggestions ...

Arnheim, Rudolf.  Entropy and Art: An Essay on
   Disorder and Order.  Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1971.

Campbell, Jeremy.  Grammatical Man: Information,
   Entropy, Language, and Life.  New York: Simon
   and Schuster, 1982.

Hayles, N. Katherine.  Chaos Bound: Orderly
   Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.

__________, ed.  Chaos and Order: Complex
   Dynamics in Literature and Science.  Chicago:
   U of Chicago P, 1991.

Paulson, William.  The Noise of Culture: Literary
   Texts in a World of Information.  Ithaca, NY:
   Cornell UP, 1988.  

Porush, David.  The Soft Machine: Cybernetic
   Fiction.  London: Methuen, 1985.

Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy,
   Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity.
   Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1992.

Smith, Crosbie W. and M. Norton Wise.
   Energy and Empire : A Biographical Study of
   Lord Kelvin.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.

... the last of which having engendered no small
amount of indignant e-mail to CUP on my part (was $80
when first published, now $120, and no pbk. ed. on the
horizon--I should have bought low and sold high ...).
There's a chapter on Pynchon as well in ...

Hayles, N. Katherine.  The Cosmic Web: Scientific
   Field Models and Literary Strategies in the
   Twentieth Century.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984.

... though it's not so much about entropy, per se. 
And here's a nifty bibliography ...

http://english.ttu.edu/courses/5343/5343HOME.HTM

Which lists pretty much all of the above and then
some.  Shannon (R.I.P.) and Weaver's Mathematical
Theory of Communication and Schroedinger's What is
Life/ might be worth persuing as popular scientific
works as well.  And I've posted here as to how NW's
THUOHB might also have led TRP down certain
theological paths as well ...

Okay, am back, trying to get out a few last notes on
Sec. i of Ch. 8, get Sec. ii going, the past several
days have been exhausting, and, as a result of their
results, I'm going to probably have a day this coming
weekend tied up as well, but I should have all the
notes I've been preparing up by the coming week. 
Jeez, this is just like school.  Research and research
until at LEAST--and, more typically, after--the last
minute, and then attempt to crank something out on the
fly.  You can see where my downfall was ...

--- MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> <<I'm doing some meta-research at the moment on how
> the term "entropy" moved 
>  from thermodynamics to literature, literary
> criticism and "theory". >>
> 
> Probably the most obvious link is via cybernetics.  
> 
> See, especially, Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of
> Human Beings."
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. 
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/