Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Martin Meisel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 4.60cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.992kg
ISBN: 9780231166324
ISBN 10: 023116632
Pages: 608
Publication Date: 05 January 2016
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language: English
Reviews
Meisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, or Stoppard are matched by equally detailed and thoughtful considerations of graphics by Otto Dix, the landscapes of Turner, War and Peace, Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and Hayden's Creation. -- Ross Hamilton, Barnard College Martin Meisel's magnum opus is a heroic act of defiance against its own subject matter: an enlightening, judicious, cohesive history of three millennia of thought about the terrors and attractions of chaos. The book moves with steady confidence through literature, science, art, and philosophy, illuminating many varieties of darkness, finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, it creates a whole new field of study. -- Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
Meisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, or Stoppard are matched by equally detailed and thoughtful considerations of graphics by Otto Dix, the landscapes of Turner, War and Peace, Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and Hayden's Creation. -- Ross Hamilton, Barnard College Martin Meisel's magnum opus is a heroic act of defiance against its own subject matter: an enlightening, judicious, cohesive history of three millennia of thought about the terrors and attractions of chaos. The book moves with steady confidence through literature, science, art, and philosophy, illuminating many varieties of darkness, finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, it creates a whole new field of study. -- Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University This extraordinary, encyclopedic exploration of how artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists have imagined and represented chaos explores, not chaos in the abstract, but those crucial transitions to (and from) chaos that are so intricately represented in the most complex artworks from Oedipus Rex to Melville's Moby Dick, Goya's Disasters of War, and Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. The unpredictable is thus made, not predictable, but endlessly fascinating. Meisel's is a bravura performance, one of those rare critical studies not for one but for all seasons. -- Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University If C.P. Snow had met Martin Meisel in 1959, his seminal essay decrying the chasm between the sciences and the humanities would have required a footnote: Excepting Prof. Meisel. This exhilarating masterpiece can only have emerged from a mind steeped in physics as an undergraduate and theatre as a graduate student, followed by the broadest explorations in a lifetime of scholarship. The world may have emerged from the quantum Chaos of the Big Bang, but Meisel has ordered everything since beautifully. -- David Helfand, Columbia University, author of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age [An] ambitious multidisciplinary work. Publishers Weekly
Author Information
Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater and Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts of the Nineteenth Century.
