SOURCE: "Post-Einsteinian Physics and Literature: Toward a New Poetics," in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Summer, 1989, pp. 19-30.

In the following essay, Bohnenkamp discusses the effects of Einstein's physics on the modern literary temperament.

C. P. Snow's now infamous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," popularized the notion that science and literature held two irreconcilable world views and "had almost ceased to communicate at all." It may be true that technology, applied science and literature are often at odds, but not literature and scientific theory. Snow's allegation that "It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art" is preposterous. Even if scientists and writers do not always communicate as well as they might, there is at least a semblance of cultural continuity in any given age; the thinkers in any time share certain...