I shall discuss such links as well, but primarily as part of Pynchon’s broader engagement with these theories in order to relate his literature to human life in new ways. It is this type of response to quantum theory and the role of chance and probability there that is my main concern in this article, rather than Pynchon’s explicit links to quantum theory or other theories dealing with chance and probability. Indeed, they, or literary responses to other mathematical and scientific theories, are sometimes more effective when they use mathematical and scientific ideas translated into more general terms, dealing with one or another area of human life, even when their engagement with mathematics and science is more pronounced, as it is in Pynchon’s work.
Such responses need not overtly engage with quantum theory. From early modernist authors, such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, until our own time, literature has responded to this transformation and its implications. An Introduction: Reality without Realism, Probability without Causality, and Multiplicity without Unity in Physics and Literatureġ This article considers the relationships between Thomas Pynchon’s novels and the philosophy of chance and probability, especially in connection with quantum theory, which radically transformed our thinking concerning both concepts and, in the first place, the nature of physical reality and our interaction with it.
0 kommentar(er)
