Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel

Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

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A Voice of Disturbance - Robert Coover und Mythos

Introducing a special issue on neuroscience and modern fiction, this essay surveys current work on literature and brain research, outlining the issue’s structure and guiding philosophy. To map out what is at stake in such readings, the introduction offers a sustained reading of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star , placing it into a larger social and historical context that reveals its extensive engagement with (often popular) neuroscientific source material. This reading provides an entry point into a consideration of the asymmetrical historical distribution of cognitive literary studies, especially their comparative neglect of post-1900 fiction, and sets the scene for the essays that follow.

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

RESUMEN: Es el proposito de este articulo analizar la manera en la que Pynchon activa, de forma autoconsciente, un cuidadoso simbolismo en la figura femenina. Como focalizadoras socialmente comprometidas, los personajes femeninos se convierten en la herramienta narrativa del autor para llevar a cabo una dura critica social y politica de la America contemporanea. Al propio tiempo, una compleja galeria de significantes femeninos con multiples ‐o “derridianamente” diferidos‐ significados permite al novelista insistir en la imposibilidad epistemologica de alcanzar una representacion satisfactoria de la realidad externa, abogando asi por una reconceptualizacion del pensamiento clasico.

/pdf/the-escaping-presence-of-the-female-en-thomas-pynchon-s-2iwx09yss3.pdf

The escaping presence of the female en Thomas Pynchon's novels

This paper offers an analysis of Doctorow's City of God both as a kaleidoscopic novel on twentieth-century culture and as a creative playground whose aim is to escape postmodern eclecticism and bring forward a new moral stand connected to contemporary scientific concepts and a posthuman understanding of life. Metafictional techniques and the role assigned to voice and metalepsis are analyzed as apparent postmodern strategies that paradoxically help to dissolve the cultural antagonism existing between science and religion/metaphysics, a blurring of categorical borders that also seems to announce the end of that eclectic postmodern ethos that has dominated the last decades of the twentieth century. Is there any way out or beyond postmodern uncertainty within the postmodern literary project? Can creative literature make the human being advance into any sound comprehension of the real or, on the contrary, is there no exit to escape from the continual signifying game? As I see it, E.L. Doctorow has written City of God (2000) in order to illustrate the cultural end of the second millennium and its critical and cultural parodoxes. A postmodern writer basically preoccupied by the limits between history and fiction, text and reality (Williams 1996), in his latest novel Doctorow goes further in his attempt to fight the contemporary impact of cultural relativism (see Norris 1997: ch. 2). Being as it is a new reflection on old concerns of the author, City of God has a main story that unfolds mostly around the end of the year 1999. This time the novelist has not decided to go back to the near past of the United States in order to scrutinize the social and political forces then operating, as he did in some of his bestselling novels such as Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate or The Waterworks. Now the narrative unfolds in the city of New York at the end of the twentieth century, both a setting and a period overcharged with symbolism that allow the writer to analyze, in a complex and impressively metafictional way, the state metaphysical inquiries have reached by the turn of the millennium.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/759781.pdf

Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel

Citations

Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

A Voice of Disturbance - Robert Coover und Mythos

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

The escaping presence of the female en Thomas Pynchon's novels

The Profane Becomes Sacred: Escaping Eclecticism in Doctorow's "City of God"

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