Thesis ID: CBB413772386

Improbable Realism: The Postwar American Novel and the Digital Aesthetic (2021)

unapi

This dissertation examines the influence of a new form of statistical thinking on American fiction written between 1950 and 1964, elucidating in particular a tendency by novelists seeking a departure from previous novelistic forms to incorporate mathematical improbability into literary realism. Even as literary critics in the 1950s insisted that fictional events must be probable to be realistic, the most celebrated postwar novelists were drawing from the statistical sciences tools for redefining realism as a form capacious enough for the unbelievable. Why do we find such improbable plot twists as the deus ex machina in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, or the divine miracle in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away? Might we associate these portrayals of the unbelievable with the random coincidences in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and the chance encounters in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man? Drawing extensively on archival materials related to cryptography, cybernetics, and literary history, Improbable Realism shows that what links these apparent flights from reality is the same statistical thinking that gave rise to digital media during the postwar era. The digital emerged in particular from the tendency at midcentury to quantify apparently unquantifiable phenomena, and I argue that it is the surprising influence of this mathematical formalism on these novels that accounts for the new version of realism I identify. Improbable Realism indeed brings to light a digital aesthetic, revealing a phase of the American novel we have not yet identified—one in which math conditions even those features of the novel that appear to resist quantification. Improbable Realism thus tells a new story about the American novel’s entry into the digital age.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB413772386/

Similar Citations

Thesis Kristen Tapson; (2017)
Joint Experiments: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and the Coproduction of Knowledge (/isis/citation/CBB600708384/)

Book Peter Middleton; (2015)
Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (/isis/citation/CBB288779393/)

Thesis Moritz Ingwersen; (2018)
All Things Fusible: Media, Science, and Mythology in the Fiction of Neal Stephenson (/isis/citation/CBB583734163/)

Article Godin, Benoît; (2008)
The Information Economy: The History of a Concept through Its Measurement, 1949--2005 (/isis/citation/CBB000850078/)

Thesis Brian Allen Gazaille; (2016)
Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB161127975/)

Thesis Wells, Stephen H.; (2008)
William Dean Howells and the New Science: Darwinian Evolution and the Rise of Realism (/isis/citation/CBB001561253/)

Book Castells, Manuel; (2001)
Internet galaxy: Reflections on the internet, business and society (/isis/citation/CBB001180055/)

Book Streeter, Thomas; (2010)
The net effect: Romanticism, capitalism, and the internet (/isis/citation/CBB001180086/)

Thesis Hsu, Leo Lopung; (2007)
Hacking Development: How Geeks Do Good in the “Digital Age” (/isis/citation/CBB001561401/)

Article Brad Sherman; (2018)
Intangible Machines: Patent Protection for Software in the United States (/isis/citation/CBB843796158/)

Chapter Downey, Greg; (2007)
The librarian and the Univac: automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair (/isis/citation/CBB001180032/)

Article McClelland, James L.; (2012)
R. Duncan Luce (1925--2012) (/isis/citation/CBB001320468/)

Thesis Magnet, Shoshana Amielle; (2008)
Encoding the Body: Critically Assessing the Collection and Uses of Biometric Information (/isis/citation/CBB001561133/)

Thesis Ekaterina Igorevna Babintseva; (2020)
Cyberdreams of the Information Age: Learning with Machines in the Cold War United States and the Soviet Union (/isis/citation/CBB162068697/)

Book Yaszek, Lisa; (2008)
Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction (/isis/citation/CBB000953982/)

Authors & Contributors
Wonham, Henry
Shaw, Lytle
Lindee, Susan M.
Robinson, Charles
Hollinger, Veronica
Babintseva, Ekaterina Igorevna
Concepts
Information technology
Science and literature
Literary analysis
Technology and society
Information theory
Communication technology
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
Gilded Age (1870s-1900)
20th century
Places
United States
Canada
Soviet Union
Institutions
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment