misc. @1992

[Mark Kohut]

Fiction in the quantum universe
Author: Susan Strehle
<http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AStrehle%2C+Susan.&qt=hot_author>
Publisher: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, ©1992.
Edition/Format:  Print book : State or province government publication :
EnglishView all editions and formats
<http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/24546272/editions?editionsView=true&referer=di>
Database: WorldCat
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.  Read less
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