Arcadia is wonderful. We read it in a high school English class at my STEM-focused high school.
The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science.
Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later)
Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.
Well, at leats they had Canticle, so well done for not being totally closed, but the problem with this and many reading lists is it's just. so. predictable.
Authors in the above I have not heard of: Laurie R. King, Christopher Fry
I'm not saying these are bad but the list focuses on what's well known, not what's obscure and perhaps better. In that sense it's gutless. It invites you down the well trodden paths where there's no risk of upset, all carefully vetted. And it makes me sad because it seems to want to usher people into conformity, of not being open to new ideas. Don't scare the horses.
I don't have time to list books I'd find interesting, but this is depressing for me.
...aaand the inevitable downvotes. Not "you're wrong, here's why", just a surly response that you don't like it. I made my point clearly enough, the lack of a constructive response kind of backs up that being stuck in a rut is a good thing in literature.
(I suppose it could have been down to me not offering an alternative reading list, but I don't think that's all of it)
Curious coincidence to see this here. I happened to read this a few weeks ago. It’s a brilliant conception, hiliarious and passionate. Usually when math and physics rear their heads in a work of literature, I get ready to cringe. But not here. Nothing is gratuitous; everything has meaning.
We saw it in London he week it opened. I still don’t know how my wife managed that. I’m not normally a huge fan of the stage but I was captivated. Not a comedy per se, but some sly elements really made me laugh!
This was the first play I ever read for fun (instead of for a class). I fell in love with it, and over the years I've re-read it several times. I don't know what it was -- it just bit me, somehow.
Some theater company was performing it here in the bay area not too long ago, but at the time I was broke (and too old for the cheap "We must find a way to get young people to watch theater" tickets). Now I could afford it! But I guess there's not a lot of live theater going on at the moment...
My wife dragged me to see Arcadia in 1995 (Stage Door Theatre, San Francisco) - I was mesmerized. Reading it is good; seeing it performed is much better.
While reading it I kept wondering how it would be staged, especially near the end, with the characters from different periods in the scene together. It seemed to me it would be really difficult to produce, but could be a wonderful theater experience if it were pulled off.
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The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science.
Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later)
Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.