Título: ‘Make it New’ with Mathematics? Literature, Mathematics, and the First World War
Ponente: Nina Engelhartd
Fecha: 3 de diciembre 2024
Hora: 10:00 horas
Transmisión por Facebook @Instituto de Matemáticas
Abstract:
‘Make it new’ – poet Ezra Pound’s slogan encapsulates a key principle of modernist art and literature, not least developing as a response to the profound upheaval caused by the First World War. Pound, as well as other modernist writers, also turned to mathematics to ‘make it new’. As the narrator of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities claims: mathematics is “the new method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and the primal source of an incredible transformation”. Published in the early 1930s, Musil’s novel is set in Austria in the year before the outbreak of the First World War and, as the quotation suggests, refers to mathematics to try to explain the crisis and to sketch hope for the future. In this talk, I use Musil’s The Man without Qualities and his essay “The Mathematical Man”, along with other material, to examine how literary texts from the early twentieth century present mathematics as contributing to, exemplifying, and offering solutions to the sense of crisis – epistemological, political, cultural – culminating in the First World War. Examining how literary texts draw on mathematical concepts as well as on its historical development and ideas in the philosophy of mathematics, this talk engages with the question whether we can speak of a mathematical modernism, that is, of a cultural embeddedness of mathematics that warrants viewing it as part of the cultural movement of modernism.
Semblanza:
Es especialista en estudios literarios en el departamento de Literaturas y Culturas Inglesas de la Universidad de Stuttgart. Además de su investigación en la intersección entre literatura, ciencias naturales y tecnología, trabaja en el proyecto ‘Negotiating Tolerance: Literature and Tolerance in the Victorian Era’. Tiene varias publicaciones sobre la relación entre matemáticas y literatura. Destaca el libro Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Es editora y colaboradora en el libro The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics.
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