Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction

This book delivers an innovative critical approach to better understand U.S. fiction of the information age, and argues that in the last eighty years, fiction has become increasingly concerned with its representations of mathematical ideas, images, and practices. In so doing, this book provides a fuller, transnational account of the place of mathematics in understanding mathematically informed novels. Literature and science studies have acknowledged and situated historical points of cultural crossover; by emphasising mathematics within this larger intellectual context and not as an unlikely and alien adjunct to post-war culture this monograph clarifies how mathematically informed postmodern fictions work in a cognate fashion to other fields undergoing structuralist revolutions. This is especially evident in fiction by the key, mathematically-literate Postmodern authors upon whom this study focuses, namely, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, through which recent the technological revolutions, facilitated by mathematics, manifest in cultural discourse.

Emphasises the contingency of mathematics on cultural and political changes Focuses on new understanding of literary postmodernism in dialogue with mathematical science Reveals the overlooked ways in which representative mathematical concepts inform signature literary developments

Autorentext
Stuart J. Taylor is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, UK.

Zusammenfassung

Taylor s study is rich with sources that are potent not only for understanding the book s central points but also help to appreciate the scope of the interplay between mathematics and literature, history, sociology and general cultural development. ... The book is a veritable contribution to the study of literature and mathematics ." (Anatolii Kozlov, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, May 2, 2025)

Inhalt
Introduction.- 1. Topological Structures and Allusion in Ratner's Star.- 2. Algebraic Structures and Metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow.- 3. Ordered Structures and Cognition in Infinite Jest.- 4. Conclusion: Literary Legacy of Mathematical Structures.