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Full Description
Today, we have forgotten that mathematics was once aligned with the arts, rather than with the sciences. Literary Infinities analyses the connection between the late 19th-century revolution in the mathematics of the infinite and the literature of 20th-century modernism, opening up a novel path of influence and inquiry in modernist literature. Baylee Brits considers the role of numbers and the concept of the infinite in key modernists, including James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. She begins by recuperating the difficult and rebellious German mathematician, Georg Cantor, for the broader artistic, cultural and philosophical project of modernism. Cantor revolutionized the mathematics of the infinite, creating reverberations across the numerical sciences, philosophy, religion and literary modernism. This 'modernist' infinity is shown to undergird and shape key innovations in narrative form, creating a bridge between the mathematical and the literary, presentation and representation, formalism and the tactile imagination.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Actual Infinities: Cantor's Proofs and Modern Fiction
2. The Aleph: Jorge Luis Borges and the Measure of Prose
3. The Lemniscate: Infinite Shapes in the Work of Samuel Beckett
4. One: J.M. Coetzee and the Name of the Number
5. X: Conclusion: Literary Infinities after Zeno and Cantor
Bibliography
Index
