Entropy in Victorian Literature
Date
April 2022
Location
Schewel 217
Description
In the chemical world, entropy, or the randomness and chaos of a system, must continually increase; it is much more favorable for things to fall apart than to be put together. I believe this scientific concept can be rightly applied to the study of literature. While it is true books contain information put together into some sense of order from chaos, making them counterintuitive to entropy, I am convinced these works must still obey the laws of thermodynamics. There must be an increase in chaos somewhere, and if it is not within the words themselves, it must lie within the ideas they represent, their interpretation by readers, and the deconstruction of the text through literary analysis. In this study, the works of Victorian authors including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot, are deconstructed into entropic elements such as the lack of a reliable center, spontaneous combustion, the idea of revolution, and the profuse uselessness of clutter, dust, and empty actions. This very act of literary analysis and the search for an identifiable meaning, often to incomplete ends, only highlights the inevitable role of entropy in all things.
Presentation Type
Presentation
Entropy in Victorian Literature
Schewel 217
In the chemical world, entropy, or the randomness and chaos of a system, must continually increase; it is much more favorable for things to fall apart than to be put together. I believe this scientific concept can be rightly applied to the study of literature. While it is true books contain information put together into some sense of order from chaos, making them counterintuitive to entropy, I am convinced these works must still obey the laws of thermodynamics. There must be an increase in chaos somewhere, and if it is not within the words themselves, it must lie within the ideas they represent, their interpretation by readers, and the deconstruction of the text through literary analysis. In this study, the works of Victorian authors including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot, are deconstructed into entropic elements such as the lack of a reliable center, spontaneous combustion, the idea of revolution, and the profuse uselessness of clutter, dust, and empty actions. This very act of literary analysis and the search for an identifiable meaning, often to incomplete ends, only highlights the inevitable role of entropy in all things.