About
I am a specialist in modern and contemporary American fiction. My research focuses on histories of science and technology as contexts for fictional narratives. My book _Pynchon and Relativity_ shows that Thomas Pynchon’s fiction gives narrative shape to the spacetime continuum described by the physics of Relativity, but that this does not mean that his characters are trapped in a static, wholly determined ‘block universe’. Rather, Pynchon depicts a spacetime compatible with the pluralistic indeterminism of William James and the dynamic flux of Henri Bergson’s _durée_.
My current project, now nearing completion, is an article about David Foster Wallace’s _The Pale King_. I am investigating the connections between techniques of postmodernist self-reference – which Wallace borrows from John Barth – and the representation of bureaucracy in the novel, with particular focus on punch-card technology.
These projects are linked by an interest in the relationship between spatiality and linear narrative, which will also be important in my next project, looking at interpretations of Einstein and Relativity in literary criticism and narrative theory as they are applied to twentieth and twenty-first century American fiction.
