Fiction in the Quantum Universe

By Susan Strehle

296 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4365-9
    Published: May 1992
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6488-3
    Published: November 2000
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6703-2
    Published: November 2000

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In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme.

According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer "realistic"; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known -- all terms taken from 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. Strehle argues that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century history, politics, science, and discourse.

About the Author

Susan Strehle is associate vice provost for graduate studies at the State University of New York at Bighamton.


For more information about Susan Strehle, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A worthy book--one which offers a new means of understanding literature and opens up new questions. . . . A valuable contribution to the study of both literary theory and the novel."--Synthesis

"Strehle is a superior critic who has written a significant analysis of several major works in an overlooked but essential context. . . . [The book] is a coherent whole, not just a collection of disparate essays. It is carefully organized around a specific theme, which she has expressed in sophisticated yet accessible terms."--John Kuehl, New York University

"Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe performs a valuable service in showing that the realist/antirealist categories of contemporary fiction cannot adequately account for the qualities of fictions that she calls 'actualist,' which are the same qualities of a quantum universe hovering between existence and nonexistence, reality and nonreality. With an impressive range of references and supple readings of important contemporary authors, Fiction in the Quantum Universe connects importantly to current debates within the scientific community on realism and antirealism. I recommend it highly."--N. Katherine Hayles