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.

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.