Chaos Imagined

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.

• List of Illustrations OMEGA. Uncertainty and Complexity: An Untethered Epilogue After Entropy Incompleteness and Incongruity The Message of the Quantum Lost Horizons Chaos Everywhere Looking Askance Chaosmos 1. Shaping Chaos 2. Nothing and Something Something out of Nothing? Nothing in Something "The Nurse of Becoming" Saying Nothing Nothing as Nothing The Middle of Nowhere Positive Negation 3. Number: The One and the Many Division and Multiplication Sophocles' Thought Experiment Imagining the Worst Taking the Measure One World or Many? "Number-Worlds" A Glance Into the Abyss Truth and Poetry Sightlines Everything by One and One 4. Carnival Monstrous Confusion Going to the Fair Dreamworks Lords of Misrule Parody Refram'd The Wild God 5. War Representation Conscripting War Emblematics Condition Soldiers and Peasants: Callot Goya's Nightmare Dix and the Chaos Within Consummation Managing the Chaos The Fog of Battle Armageddon and Apocalypse 6. Energy Matter in Motion (Inertia, Friction, Noise) Statics and Dynamics The Homeostatic Universe Friction and Noise Nebular Hypotheses Energy Unbound Wirrwarr Petrific Chaos Energy's Epic Energy's Image Postlude: Energy's Acolytes 7. Entropy Time and Tide Conservation and Convertibility Double-Entry Physics The Death of the Universe Ancestral Voices A Question of Time A Sense of Direction Second Thoughts Tristes Entropics Nature Decay'd Chekhov's Fiddle Entartung Zola's Fevers Vox clamantis Anarchy and Endgame Resistance and Complementarity Beckett and the Shape of Chaos Sights and Sounds 8. Coda, or Da capo al fine Notes Bibliography Index

Meisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, and 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 Haydn's Creation. -- Ross Hamilton, Barnard College 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 and finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, Meisel creates a whole new field of study. -- Edward Mendelson, 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. The unpredictable is then made not predictable but endlessly fascinating. Martin Meisel's is a bravura performance, one of those rare critical studies not for one but for all seasons. -- Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University This exhilarating masterpiece can only have emerged from a mind steeped in physics as an undergraduate and theater 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, author of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age [An] ambitious multidisciplinary work. Publishers Weekly