throughs,” she said, “are not about progress.” The workshop’s humanists, including the Harvard art historian Maria Gough, liked the term “rupture.” Breakthroughs are not always “extremely positive,” Gough said, but may occasion the “break, breach, tear” of disruption. She off ffered as examples Andy Warhol’s break from advertising to art in 1960 and Picasso’s provocatively intimate Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907.
biographer who writes novels, an artist working at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, and a Brandeis graduate student who is writing a canon-defying dissertation on Victorian science fiction. “We’re going for a seminar feel from 60 people,” said John Plotz RI ’12, a professor of English at Brandeis University. (He and the University of Toronto astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana RI ’12 were the day’s moderators.) “We want this to be a freefloating conversation.” By the end of the day, Plotz fl hoped, a multidisciplinary sense of creative breakthrough might emerge. The many voices at “Breakthroughs” whirled around Radcliff ffe Gymnasium like comets, writing on the sky this taxonomy of creativity:
SCALE VARIES. Crafting a poem involves private discoveries, said Ferry. “Every new line, in a sense, feels like a breakthrough.” And those discoveries are often oblique—even removed from agency. “Creativity is what the work does while it is doing it,” he said. As the poet works with his pencil, Spiropulu analyzes data from a $10 billion Large Hadron Collider—thousands of bus-sized superconducting magnets in a ring 17 miles long.
RUPTURE HAPPENS. The prose-poet and literary critic Maureen McLane called poetry a tool for rupturing the everyday. “Poetic break-
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The day proved a gathering of breakneck RAPTURE HAPPENS TOO. Richard verve for gave the world “a breakthrough in the lanthe eclec- Wagner guage of music,” said music critic Alex Ross—one that tic—all in the following decades inspired French symbolist two panels, in poets and pioneers of modernist prose such as Eliot a musical and Joyce. (He called Wagner a genius, despite his interlude, political views and despite attracting “Hitler’s cataand a strophic love.”) Wagner’s 1850 Lohengrin was so radikeynote address. cal that it “obliterated opera as it existed,” said Ross,
and is so emotionally attuned that it still “activates the inner passion.” The science biographer Richard Holmes liked the notion of creative rupture but added Wagnerian “rapture” to the mix.
TOGETHERNESS CAN HELP. Poets may not exactly collaborate, but they maintain “communities of recognition,” said McLane, who ruminated on the storied Robert Lowell–Elizabeth Bishop correspondence. But sometimes, she admit-