Lovorka Gruic-Grmusa

Bio: Lovorka Gruic-Grmusa is an academic researcher from University of Rijeka. The author has contributed to research in topics: Becoming. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 4 citations.

Alternate space–times in Robert Coover’s texts: some ontological questions

Abstract: Our reality or actual space–time is composed of highly complex and indeterminate but interconnected structures, and both natural sciences and contemporary literature refer to it as a world of pluralized rhythms and emergent potentialities, always becoming, in which values are relative and process-dependent. Aware of the discontinuity and relativity of any space–time creation, including our experiential reality and fictive realities generated by our minds, this article attempts to discern potential space-times in Robert Coover’s texts and depict their ontological landscapes. These ontological realms are often presented as characters’ self-generated fictions into which they get so immersed that they lose the ability to discern the real from the fictive, as they switch from one world to the other. This permits the protagonists’ momentary escape, but also causes their psychic fragmentation, blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. In the form of stories within stories or as representations, such as descriptions of photographs, games, movies, and TV programs, Coover’s texts demonstrate interconnections of fictional and real space-times, blurring their borderlines, and even collapsing into one another. Throughout his opus, Coover is raising questions about the nature of reality, being and becoming, including the query that concerns ontological issues of text and world, fact and fiction, creator and creature, and how does a specific space-time emerge, solidify, and evolve. Thus, the purpose of this article is to examine the specificity of alternate space-times in Robert Coover’s most challenged texts in terms of ontology.

"relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract: The task of quantizing general relativity raises serious questions about the meaning of the present formulation and interpretation of quantum mechanics when applied to so fundamental a structure as the space-time geometry itself. This paper seeks to clarify the foundations of quantum mechanics. It presents a reformulation of quantum theory in a form believed suitable for application to general relativity. The aim is not to deny or contradict the conventional formulation of quantum theory, which has demonstrated its usefulness in an overwhelming variety of problems, but rather to supply a new, more general and complete formulation, from which the conventional interpretation can be deduced. The relationship of this new formulation to the older formulation is therefore that of a metatheory to a theory, that is, it is an underlying theory in which the nature and consistency, as well as the realm of applicability, of the older theory can be investigated and clarified.

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

Abstract: Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

Confronting Chaos@@@Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction

Abstract: Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms "proceduralists"), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls "disruptors"). Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of "orderly disorder," Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literary and engages in a greater degree of interactivity - between literature and science, and between author and reader. Thus, Conte concludes, contemporary literature is a literature of flux and flexibility.