Book by Coale, Samuel Chase

Episodic and disconnected, much of postmodern fiction mirrors the world as quantum theorists describe it, according to Samuel Chase Coale. In Quirks of the Quantum, Coale shows how the doubts, misgivings, and ambiguities reflected in the postmodern American novel have been influenced by the metaphors and models of quantum theory. Coale explains the basic facets of quantum theory in lay terms and then applies them to a selection of texts, including Don DeLillo's Underworld, Joan Didion's Democracy, and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Using a new approach to literature and culture, this book aims to bridge the gap between science and the humanities by suggesting the many areas where they connect.

Product Description: Nathaniel Hawthorne, celebrated in his own day for sketches that now seem sentimental, came only gradually to be fully appreciated for what his friend Herman Melville diagnosed as the "power of blackness" in his fiction - the complex moral grappling with sin and guilt...read more

Product Description: Coale explores the profound influence that the mesmerist and spiritualist 'craze' of the 1840s and 1850s had on Hawthorne's artistic vision and fictional techniques.Nathaniel Hawthorne despised both mesmerism and spiritualism, viewing these pseudosciences as new incarnations of witchcraft, in which the master-slave relationship overwhelms all others...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)