Shimek, Suzanne Elizabeth (Author)
University of California, Los Angeles
Hayles, N. Katherine
Edition Details: Advisor: Hayles, N. Katherine
Physical Details: 240 pp.
Language: English
The dissertation compares the language of quantum theorists Niels Bohr, Hugh Everett, and David Bohm with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Stephanie Strickland. Quantum theorists and twentieth-century American experimental poets have often shared similar concerns regarding the representational efficacy of language. During the 1920s, some physicists started to realize that they could no more offer a transcendental pronouncement on the state of nature than the poet could on the nature of human experience. In their negotiations with the language/reality problem, poets and physicists often used similar literary strategies. This study explores how concepts such as "uncertainty," "probability," and "complementarity," which start, in the late 1920s, to appear as metaphors in essays by quantum theorists, also start, about the same time, to emerge in various prosodic elements in American poetry. By rendering these new concepts not just in metaphor, but also in structure and syntax, poets provide alternative means for accessing unfamiliar or "non- commonsensical" ideas. Physics, in turn, provides strategies for engaging with unconventional poetry. I map a number of approaches to the language/reality problem in both quantum theory and poetry, for there is no more a definitive quantum theory than there is a definitive post-modernist poetics. The essay progresses from more traditional and "determinate" poetry, T. S. Eliot's {italic} The Four Quartets{/italic}, to more difficult or "indeterminate" poetry, Gertrude Stein's {italic}Stanzas in Meditation{/italic}, to a hypertext poem, {italic}True North{/italic}, that puts into question the very categories of writers and readers, reference and referent. The dissertation also moves from a more standard or "canonical" version of quantum theory--Bohr's "Copenhagen interpretation"--to the more "bizarre" renditions, including Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation and David Bohm's "implicate order." The first chapter provides a rationale for putting quantum physics and experimental poetry in conversation; each of the subsequent three chapters puts a physicist in dialogue with a particular poet.
...MoreDescription “The dissertation compares the language of quantum theorists Niels Bohr, Hugh Everett, and David Bohm with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Stephanie Strickland.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 3789. UMI order no. 3032834.
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