Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde

Rachel Fountain Eames is an academic and creative writer who holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, as has published work on 19th- and 20th-century literature, modern visual art, and science. She can be found on Twitter @rfeames.

In a book that manages to provide lucid explanations of complex physics concepts, Eames traces a wide range of different paths by which the developments in physics and art in the early twentieth century influenced each other. Filled to the brim with entertaining anecdotes about the various authors and their shocking lives, the text is at its strongest in its ability to highlight the tangential roads of influence between various art movements and developments in physics.

• Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Poetry and PhysicsThe Age of Revolutions: An Overview of Physics in the Period 1905-1945 Relativity Theory The Emergence of Quanta Visualizing the Atom The Quantum Revolution The New York Avant-Garde Four New York PoetsRelative Measure: William Carlos Williams’s Einsteinian Poetics Cubist Poetics in Spring and All (1923)Revising Relativity: The Second Version of ‘St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’‘The only reality that we can know is MEASURE’: Einstein in Paterson Mina Loy’s Energy Physics Parody Physics: Loy’s Futurist SatiresPhysics without Parody: ‘Parturition’ (1914)Loy’s Atomic Spiritualism The Man of Electric Vitality: Insel (1933-1936)Back to the Bomb: Rethinking Atomic Dissolution the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Physical Systems Dada’s Cult of Indeterminacy Smashing Duchamp’s Glass: The Baroness Against the Dada ScientistsQuantum Dissolution in Weimar Berlin ‘Life is science’: Order Through Science in the Baroness’s Later Poetry The Quantum Poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck The Visualizability Question and the Poetic Image The Image in Superposition: Stevens and Surrealism Stevens’s Phantom Problem ‘Invisible or visible or both’: An Abstracted PoeticsConclusion APPENDIX 1 – Parallel Timeline Bibliography