Book ID: CBB204147348

Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science (2016)

unapi

Meisel, Martin (Author)


Columbia University Press


Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 608
Language: English

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes.Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

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Reviewed By

Review Keith Tribe (2018) Review of "Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science". American Historical Review (p. 549). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB204147348/

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Authors & Contributors
Christoph Wegmann
Vermij, Rienk H.
Tinios, Ellis
Samuel, Nina
Ridley, Glynis
Ogilvie, Brian W.
Concepts
Science and art
Visual representation; visual communication
Science and literature
Science and culture
Scientific illustration
Natural history
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
20th century
17th century
16th century
Places
Germany
France
Philadelphia, PA
England
United States
Netherlands
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