ThermoPoetics

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Entropy is alive in literature earlier than in Gaddis and Pynchon--

ThermoPoetics
Energy in Victorian Literature and Science
Barri J. Gold

In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous,
intertwined, and mutually productive poetry and physics may be.
Charting the simultaneous emergence of the laws of thermodynamics in
literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds that not
only can science influence literature, but literature can influence
science, especially in the early stages of intellectual development.
Nineteenth-century physics was often conducted in words. And, Gold
claims, a poet could be a genius in thermodynamics and a novelist
could be a damn good engineer.

Gold's lively readings of works by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens,
Herbert Spencer, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and others offer a
decidedly literary introduction to such elements of thermodynamic
thought as conservation and dissipation, the linguistic tension
between force and energy, the quest for a grand unified theory,
strategies for coping within an inexorably entropic universe, and the
demonic potential of the thermodynamically savvy individual. Victorian
literature embraced the language and ideas of energy physics to
address the era's concerns about religion, evolution, race, class,
empire, gender, and sexuality. Gold argues that these concerns in turn
shaped the hopes and fears expressed about the new physics. With
ThermoPoetics Gold not only offers us a new lens through which to view
Victorian literature, but also provides in-depth examples of the
practical applications of such a lens. Thus Gold shows us that in In
Memoriam, Tennyson expresses thermodynamic optimism with a vision of
transformation after loss; in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens produces
order in spite of the universal drive to entropy, and in Bleak House
he treats the novel itself as series of engines; and Wilde's Dorian
Gray and Stoker's Dracula reveal the creative potential of chaos.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=12177&ttype=2

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12177&mode=toc