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Zusatztext Baylee Brits’s excellent book offers a deeply intelligent yet accessible account of the relationship between modernist literary form and Cantor’s revolutionary mathematical modernism. Brimming with interdisciplinary energy and underpinned with careful scholarship, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how and why literary modernists used formal numerical experimentation and the paradoxes of number in their reconfigurations of the relationship between words and meaning. Informationen zum Autor Baylee Brits is a research fellow at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia and teaches English Literature and Media Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the co-editor of Aesthetics After Finitude (Re.Press 2016), and The Covert Plant (Punctum 2017), both anthologies on contemporary intersections between science, literature and art. Vorwort Explores how modernist prose fiction was influenced by the 19th-century mathematical revolution of the concept of infinity. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis AcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. Actual Infinities : Cantor’s Proofs and Modern Fiction2. The Aleph : Jorge Luis Borges and the Measure of Prose3. The Lemniscate : Infinite Shapes in the Work of Samuel Beckett4. One : J.M. Coetzee and the Name of the Number5. X : Conclusion: Literary Infinities after Zeno and CantorBibliography Index...
