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Literature and Science :
An Interdisciplinary Approach.
An Experiment on T. S. Eliot and Relativity.
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First, read 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' and if you have time,
read 'The Waste Land.' The manuscript of the poem is here.
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In 2001, Michael H. Whitworth published Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Here is a review : Leane, Elizabeth. The Review of English Studies ns 54.213 (2003): 151-53.
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Next, read Tomlinson, David. "T. S. Eliot and the Cubists." Twentieth Century Literature 26.1 (1980): 64-81.
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Question: "Having established these grounds for the changing relations between literature and science in the modernist period, Whitworth turns in his final three chapters to the metaphors generated by three specific scientific theories, and examines their deploy- ment in (primarily) the work of Woolf, Lawrence, and Eliot. In each case, he suggests, the metaphors provided new ways of representing the modernist subject. The developing theory of the atom, he convincingly argues, enabled writers to construct subjectivity in terms of permeability and solidity. The concept of simultaneity, a central component of Einstein's special theory of relativity, juxtaposed with the different kinds of simultaneity evoked by new telecommunications technology, provided fresh ways of representing the relationship between the individual, time, memory, and history. The non-Euclidean geometry of the general theory of relativity, with its metaphors of surface and flatness, generated (among other things) a rethinking of the body." (Leane). Discuss using examples from Eliot's poetry to support your analysis.
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