From apocalypse to entropy and beyond

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This monograph investigates the two competing paradigms of ‘The End’ in American literature, the Biblical apocalypse and the thermodynamic ‘heat-death’, in historical surveys and close readings of representative texts. Opening with an overview of apocalyptic motifs in American fiction and a detailed reading of Bernard Malamud’s ‘post-apocalyptic’ novel ‘God’s Grace’, the book then reconstructs the development of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its changing cultural contexts from Carnot and Clausius through Boltzmann and Shannon to Prigogine’s ‘dissipative structures’ and the finding of chaos theory. Having established the necessary background, it traces the function of the entropy notion in literary criticism, analyzes its widely neglected role in selected novels from Updike and Kesey through Pynchon and Gaddis to DeLillo and Bowden, and closes with a detailed reading of Thomas Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’. As the first comprehensive treatment of the cultural metaphorization of the crucially important entropy concept, the monograph sheds new light on the interaction between science and literature and thus contributes to the interaction between science and literature and thus contributes to the overdue closing of the gap between C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’.