Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction [electronic resource] : Human and Temporal Connectivities /
Engelhardt, Nina.editor.
Hoydis, Julia.editor.
This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and in times to come.
1. Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century -- 2. The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction -- 3. Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle -- 4. New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction. - 5. Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body -- 6. Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation -- 7. Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman -- 8. The Lures and Limitations of the Natural Sciences: Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree -- 9. "It’s for Fellows only!": On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity -- 10. Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Technologies of Modernism -- 11. Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone. .
This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and in times to come.
Literature, Modern—20th century.
Literature, Modern—21st century.
Technology in literature.
Fiction.
Contemporary Literature.
Literature and Technology/Media.
Fiction.