Dore, Florence (Advisor)
Sean DiLeonardi (Author)
Dore, Florence
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Physical Details: 155
Language: English
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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Kristen Tapson;
(2017)
Joint Experiments: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and the Coproduction of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB600708384/)
Article
Godin, Benoît;
(2008)
The Information Economy: The History of a Concept through Its Measurement, 1949--2005
(/isis/citation/CBB000850078/)
Thesis
Moritz Ingwersen;
(2018)
All Things Fusible: Media, Science, and Mythology in the Fiction of Neal Stephenson
(/isis/citation/CBB583734163/)
Book
Peter Middleton;
(2015)
Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After
(/isis/citation/CBB288779393/)
Thesis
Brian Allen Gazaille;
(2016)
Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910
(/isis/citation/CBB161127975/)
Thesis
Charles Robinson;
(2017)
From Jeu D'Esprit to Exact Science: Speculation, Science, and Literary Expression in the US, 1870-1895
(/isis/citation/CBB195151551/)
Thesis
Daigle, Jonathan R.;
(2006)
United States Realism and the (Conceptual) Problem of Race: Realists and Race Science from 1877 to 1905
(/isis/citation/CBB001560579/)
Thesis
Wells, Stephen H.;
(2008)
William Dean Howells and the New Science: Darwinian Evolution and the Rise of Realism
(/isis/citation/CBB001561253/)
Chapter
Maria Carla Galavotti;
(2023)
Realismo/antirealismo e teoria delle probabilità
(/isis/citation/CBB587867017/)
Article
Natalia Tsvetkova;
(2024)
Professors and Students in the Cultural Cold War: The Case of Ethiopia
(/isis/citation/CBB688695907/)
Article
Brad Sherman;
(2018)
Intangible Machines: Patent Protection for Software in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB843796158/)
Book
Streeter, Thomas;
(2010)
The net effect: Romanticism, capitalism, and the internet
(/isis/citation/CBB001180086/)
Book
Colin B. Burke;
(2018)
America's Information Wars: The Untold Story of Information Systems in America's Conflicts and Politics from World War II to the Internet Age
(/isis/citation/CBB542994156/)
Chapter
Downey, Greg;
(2007)
The librarian and the Univac: automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair
(/isis/citation/CBB001180032/)
Book
Castells, Manuel;
(2001)
Internet galaxy: Reflections on the internet, business and society
(/isis/citation/CBB001180055/)
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/)
Thesis
Gallo, Jason;
(2008)
Speaking of Science: The Role of the National Science Foundation in the Development of United States Information Infrastructure
(/isis/citation/CBB001561196/)
Thesis
Hsu, Leo Lopung;
(2007)
Hacking Development: How Geeks Do Good in the “Digital Age”
(/isis/citation/CBB001561401/)
Thesis
Lawson, Sean Trevor;
(2008)
Info[at]war.mil: Nonlinear Science and the Emergence of Information Age Warfare in the United States Military
(/isis/citation/CBB001560712/)
Thesis
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle;
(2008)
Encoding the Body: Critically Assessing the Collection and Uses of Biometric Information
(/isis/citation/CBB001561133/)
Be the first to comment!