Disorder, Affect, and Modernist Literature: Empathy After Entropy

Matthew Phillips is a Lecturer at UNC Greensboro, USA, where he has designed and taught courses on "Empathy and Imagination" and "Quarantine Literature". Matthew’s existing and forthcoming publications exhibit a wide-ranging research portfolio. Most recently, he has used the scientific principal of entropy as a metaphorical lens to study the phenomenon of the entropy/empathy paradigm, arguing that in works by Jean Toomer and Virginia Woolf, as well as in those temporally bookending modernism by Stephen Crane and Eugene O'Neill, an accumulation of entropy unpredictably results in an increase in empathic potential. Matthew has also published on Evelyn Waugh and Richard Hakluyt in an article that interrogates divergent depictions of empathy and religion in their respective work.