Fiction in the quantum universe

Resource Information

The work Fiction in the quantum universe represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Fiction in the quantum universe

Statement of responsibility

Susan Strehle

Creator

• Strehle, Susan

Subject

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• History
• Literature and science -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Physics in literature
• American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• Quantum theory in literature
• Postmodernism (Literature) -- United States

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. The changed physical world appears in both content and form in some of the most ambitious recent fiction, which Strehle names "actualism" after the observations of Werner Heisenberg. Within that framework she explores the meditations on actuality in Pynchon, Coover, Gaddis, Barth, Atwood, and Barthelme. Although important recent narratives diverge markedly from realistic practice, this book claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely on what we now understand as real. According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. Reality is no longer realistic; in the new physical or quantum universe, it is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known--all terms taken from the new physics. Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy, and "open" endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled promises and completed patterns. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Realistic novels typically construct solid, believable, particularized environments, but actualist texts combine the plausible and the strange. Thus a recognizable campus like Berkeley or Cornell has a suburb called San Narciso or Zembla. Strehle makes the point that these innovations in narrative form reflect in allied ways upon twentieth-century history, politics, and science. Arguing that the perception of a changed reality reaches into philosophy, psychology, literary theory, and other areas of inquiry, the book advances a pluralistic view of the meaning of contemporary fiction. A final chapter extends the discussion beyond the North American borders to African, South American, and European texts, suggesting a global community of writers whose fiction belongs in the quantum universe

Cataloging source

DLC

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography