Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
And Mathematics

Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.

The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-96
Author(s):  
Jane Garrity
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This chapter argues that earlier assessments of Mary Hutchinson’s writing have tended to conflate her status as a feminine arbiter of taste with her work, seeing the two as similarly irrational and slight. Such assessments have contributed to the pervasive assumption that Hutchinson is not a writer of substance and they have been instrumental in facilitating her obscurity and associating her work with a conservative concept of femininity. Instead, this chapter situates Hutchinson’s writing in relation to the Bloomsbury group’s interest in art and argues that her complex articulation of early twentieth-century femininity in Fugitive Pieces (1927) has been unjustly trivialized because of its association with the realm of fashion. Drawing from extensive archival research, this chapter shows how Hutchinson repeatedly puts femininity and modernity into conversation as she interrogates what it would mean if feminine phenomena were given a central place in our cultural analysis of modernity.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

scholarly journals Theological Underpinnings of the Modern Philosophy of Mathematics.

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Vladislav Shaposhnikov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
And Mathematics

Abstract The study is focused on the relation between theology and mathematics in the situation of increasing secularization. My main concern in the second part of this paper is the early-twentieth-century foundational crisis of mathematics. The hypothesis that pure mathematics partially fulfilled the functions of theology at that time is tested on the views of the leading figures of the three main foundationalist programs: Russell, Hilbert and Brouwer.

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-198
Author(s):  
Cees Heere
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The conclusion reflects on how questions of race and empire came to occupy a central place in Anglo-Japanese relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Reviewing some of the study’s main arguments, it dwells on what the inter-imperial debates on Anglo-Japanese relations reveal about contemporary thinking on race and empire, and the often-conflicting demands and perspectives of policymakers in London and the settler colonies. Immigration and naval defence were particular areas where disagreements were liable to arise, with the dominions seeking imperial support for their vision of a ‘white empire’, while the British strove to insulate the ‘imperial’ business of diplomacy from colonial interference.

scholarly journals SPEAKING IN MEDIAS RES: MODERNISM VERSUS MODERNITY IN SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S WINESBURG, OHIO

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Yonca DENİZARSLANI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Times ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Individual

Since the times of Homeric epics, speaking in medias res has been the most suitable form of storytelling, leaving the threshold of narrative ajar in the present, upholding a historical sense. This ancient historical sense of time, inherent in oral traditions revived in early twentieth century literary Modernism as T. S. Eliot stated in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent:” “… And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” Be it a messianic revival or primitivism, calling for a coherent context for all, the Modernists were in urge for new narrative techniques overcoming the devastating traumas of the World Wars, representing the shared experiences worldwide. In this respect, early twentieth-century. Modernism provided a literary niche for a new generation of storytellers engaged in the momentous grasp of time coalescing with an epiphany. Thus, regarding the present global crises of humanity against which we need to retreat to our local worlds, a review on literary Modernism would suggest a solution as it had once achieved as an internationalist current by gathering the minds and shared experiences in recovering from the overwhelming forces of modernity. This article aims to review literary Modernism and its correspondence with ancient forms of storytelling and sense of time in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stories regarding the shared thematic motifs transcending the cultural and national boundaries in representing the overwhelming traumas of early twentieth century modernity.

scholarly journals Literary Modernism, Anti-Semitism Jewishness and the Anxiety of Assimilation in Interwar Hungary

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Dávid Szolláth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Hungarian Literature ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Foreign Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Western European ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
European Modernism

In this paper I will provide a brief overview of early twentieth-century, Hungarian history in order to examine how anti-Semitism and anti-modernism influenced modernism’s reception in fin- de- siècle Hungary. In 1908 the most significant Hungarian literary review of the twentieth century was founded by Hugo Ignotus, Miksa Fenyő and Ernő Osvát, all of whom were assimilated Jews. The journal’s title, Nyugat, [‘West’] unambiguously marked the editors’ orientation and program of accelerating cultural modernization by reviewing and translating Western European works. For conservatives this aim of transferring aestheticism, late Symbolism and decadence was regarded as an attack against the nation’s patriotic traditions. Anxiety surrounding the Jewry’s purported “failed assimilation” was compounded by the fear that a foreign culture would have an undue impact on Hungarian literature. It is my aim to analyze both the first and second wave of modernism in Hungary so as to reveal the analogous relationship between the argument that Western European modernism is alien to the Hungarian literary style and language and the anti-Semitic argument stating that assimilation of the Jews is superficial.

scholarly journals Comparative Literature: Recent Debates on an Imagined Discipline

MANUSYA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Suradech Chotiudompant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
High Time ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Comparative literature is always a problematic discipline. Scholars from different countries and times such as René Wellek, Charles Bernheimer, Susan Bassnett, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Djelal Kadir, have attempted to delimit its scope. The variety of definitions have led to ensuing problems of shifting methodologies and frameworks. If, in the early twentieth century, a scholar tended to interrogate and theorise how one distinguished comparative literature, world literature, and general literature from one another, towards the end of that century and potentially continuing well into the new millennium, the parameters surrounding disciplinary formation have significantly changed, leading to a shift in the set of questions. Should comparative literature be differentiated from the relatively recent disciplines of postcolonial studies and cultural studies? If so, what are its scope and defining qualities? These puzzling parameters are what this essay aims to explore, as it is high time we looked inward, thinking of the discipline itself as an imagined community whose terrain is constantly shifting. Following this line of argument, the essay intends to probe into the construction of the discipline and gauge its historical development.

Joint attention, To the Lighthouse, and modernist representations of intersubjectivity

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Joint Attention ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what happens when joint attention is frustrated in its operation. Experimental fictions of the early twentieth century frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Analysis of these dramatizations demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope, and suggests a fresh reading of the famous “phantom table” in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

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