Reading for Energy: Conversion, Excess, and Entropy in Leo Tolstoy (with Jillian Porter, University of Colorado)
Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia 19 University Place, 2nd Floor, New York CityJillian Porter explores energy—the “power to make work”—as a shaping force in Tolstoy’s fictions. From the psychic “safety valves” of War and Peace to the steam engines of Anna Karenina and the excesses of The Kreutzer Sonata, the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics provided Tolstoy with a powerful store of metaphors for the workings of minds, bodies, and literary texts. How…