engleski

“Knotting into” Gravity’s Rainbow: Scientific Paradigms and Literature

Addressing the long-standing primacy that the natural sciences enjoy in public life, acting as stimuli to analogous theories in other fields of study (Adam 48), this essay demonstrates that, although science is used as a “repository of tropes” which enlightens literary texts (Hayles 20), literary expression goes hand in hand with science as a progressive force that frames cultural values and the way we experience reality. It traces the connections between literary discourse and scientific paradigms in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which go beyond metaphor to assert deeper correspondence. Embraced by a larger revolution in contemporary thought, science and literature share common ground in coping with and giving meaning to our complex space-time, where contingency, randomness, irreversibility, and self- organization rule. Thus, Gravity’s Rainbow becomes not simply an illustration, but a measure of conceptual inadequacy of contemporary thories of matter, causality, and space-time, revealing the limitations of a whole spectrum of cultural meaning-making processes.

Thomas Pynchon ; Gravity’s Rainbow ; natural sciences ; space-time ; nonlinear dynamics

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