Department of English

 See this coverage as it originally appeared in Penn's Arts & Sciences Magazine, OMNIA: https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/interdisciplinary-energy

Interdisciplinary Energy

Trained in both physics and literature, Barri Joyce Gold, Professor of Practice in English and an inaugural Senior Fellow in Penn’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, studies the development of energy concepts and ecological discourse.

For Barri Joyce Gold, interdisciplinary thinking is just the beginning. Trained in both physics and in English literature, Gold, Professor of Practice in English and an inaugural Senior Fellow in Penn’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, says that both disciplines “offer new ways of looking at the world.”

Born near Tacoma, Washington, Gold later moved to Washington, D.C., and finally to Philadelphia after her father, an engineer, retired from the U.S. Army. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study physics, where she suddenly found she had downtime while monitoring an electron discharge machine. To occupy herself, she turned to reading, which she enjoyed so much that she pursued literature, first in a master’s program at Boston College, and later, for her doctorate at the University of Chicago. “I found that the skills are transferable,” she says.

Gold is fascinated by the Victorian development of energy concepts and ecological discourse. She studies science, ecocriticism, and literature in 19th-century British novels. The walls between natural sciences and the humanities, she says, are more permeable than they seem.

Why did you enjoy studying physics?

You get a new view on the universe pretty much every semester, from special relativity to quantum mechanics to cosmology. That was my favorite part and that’s kind of my favorite thing about literary scholarship, too. Some people describe reading a book as a free pass into somebody else’s brain, and I think that’s an important life skill—but also a tremendous pleasure.

Some people gravitate toward the humanities but end up studying science or math for practical reasons. You went the other direction. What were you feeling at that time? 

I didn’t want my 17-year-old self making all of my life decisions. But it was also a more gradual move than you might think. I used to say that I was raised in the wild by a family of engineers. That’s not quite true, but there was a strong math, science, and engineering bent in my family. And so, I went to MIT to become an engineer, and even moving to physics looked more abstract and less practical. I had to explain to my dad what I would do with a physics degree, and the answer was go to graduate school.

That shift from engineering to physics to literature was a process of moving from what I expected to where I wanted to be. I haven’t given up thinking about physics, but I think about it in a very different way. You could say I just flipped my profession and my hobbies, or at least the percentages.

There’s a lot of pressure on students to major in something they consider practical. And it’s a shame, because there are so many opportunities to do other things. I talk to students from all over, not only in the School of Arts & Sciences, but from Engineering and the Wharton School and the Nursing School, and they all have something different to say—once you can convince them they can use their perspective in unexpected ways.

When did you start thinking about ecology and energy in the novel form?

Years ago, I was reading [the poet] Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and I was looking at some lines about how the hills flow: 

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

I was having coffee with a friend one day, and I brought the text, saying, “Tell me this is not about entropy.” But of course, the poem is written and even published in advance of the concept of entropy being articulated, although not before the simultaneous discoveries that go into creating the laws of thermodynamics as we know them.

I got really excited about that, and I spent a lot of time with that poem. That idea became really important to me, that you can see the way that scientific ideas circulate in culture, even before they’re consolidated as scientific ideas. For example, Tennyson’s poem—an elegy mourning his lost friend—was very much about how to reimagine loss as conservation. Tennyson’s saying, “I’ve lost my friend. How is he still here?” And of course, transformation is the answer. To a large extent, this is the discovery process that leads to thermodynamics, obviously very simplified. It’s seeing those two things as analogous processes in that cultural moment.

When you just think about the word “ecology,” by the early 20th century, it’s being defined as a full spectrum of energy exchanges among living and non-living beings and the Victorians experienced fewer disciplinary divisions than we do. At that time, people were starting to think about the conversation between science and literature in a much bigger way.

Well-known criticisms of works by Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen point to an off-camera presence of imperialism, including the slave trade, that supports the protagonists and their families. For instance, in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, the reference to Antigua likely refers to sugar plantations that fueled familial wealth. Is that how you see the energy exchange principle, as a kind of subterfuge of which the author isn’t fully conscious?

“Implicit” might be a better descriptor than “unconscious.” Energy exchange is closely related to resource distribution, and so, actually tied to imperialism. But more broadly, you get a kind of growing list of things that send off the little neon sign that says, “Energy, energy, energy!” If we look at Mansfield Park, it’s not only about an underacknowledged source of wealth; it’s also about the Bertram family living at Mansfield Park. The family is kind of enervated—tired, bored, etc. But when new neighbors, Henry and Mary Crawford, move in, they experience the change as a burst of energy, life, enthusiasm. They actually use the word “energy” to describe the Crawfords; they enliven the place. But this admission of someone from the outside also creates anxiety: Are they part of the family? Are they not?

Which goes back to the question, what happens if you have a closed system? Is it always going to be in the process of becoming rundown, dissipated, fatigued until an energy source comes in? So, there’s a lot of ambivalence around energy, even before it becomes scientific energy. Energy is closely connected to resources and exchange, but there’s often not acknowledgment around those resources.

The 18th and 19th centuries make a lot of changes that become our norms: Enclosures consolidate private property. We see the rise of nation-states, places like Germany and Italy, which had formerly been conglomerations of smaller regions. The nuclear family as a unit becomes more important. This movement is tied to an emphasis on independence, the idea of a self-sustaining unit. We depend on all of this stuff outside of ourselves, but we’re going to disavow it. To me, these patterns seem to have similarity across different scales, and they all tie to the idea of closure—as do the laws of thermodynamics.

In a closed system, energy is always conserved; entropy is always increasing. But nature doesn’t give us closed systems. The novel tries to. The aspiration and illusion of the novel is that it’s a closed system, but its own text shows that the energy is not encapsulated. We think we have the whole picture, but invariably, we’re wrong.