This introductory chapter situates the book in current discussions in the fields of literature and science studies and twenty-first-century fiction. It introduces the notion of ‘connectivities,’ understood to capture actual states as well as possibilities for connection, and distinguishes it from, respectively, the concepts of ‘two cultures’ and ‘networks’ to allow fresh and unburdened views on representations of science in contemporary fiction. Setting out the organisation of this volume in two main sections, the chapter explains the governing ideas of ‘human connectivities’ and ‘temporal connectivities’ and locates these in contemporary criticism, including conceptualisations of returns to realism and ethics, unbroken interest in the past and the future, and renegotiations of the traditionally speculative views of science fiction and its relations to mainstream literature.
This chapter introduces the five parts of the Handbook and charts the development of the field of Literature and Mathematics Studies. It sets out the rationale of dividing the chapters into five parts and provides context and scholarship on the topics: Mathematics in Literature; Mathematics and Literary Form; Mathematics, Modernism, and Literature; Relations between Literature and Mathematics; and Mathematics as Literature. The second part of this introductory chapter charts the development of the study of literature and mathematics, with reference to the broader field of literature and science studies. It highlights the specificity of mathematics as a discipline and field of knowledge and emphasizes the particular position of mathematics in research on the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of science.
This paper introduces the concept of scientific metafiction, developing it in relation to historiographic metafiction, which questions the truth of historical knowledge and highlights similarities with fiction. Scientific metafiction accordingly is marked by a refusal of the view that only science has a truth claim and by comparing science and fiction as discourses. Thomas Pynchon's novels are exemplary historiographic metafictions, and I argue that the growing importance of science and scientific metafiction is crucial to the development of the ontological dominant that, according to Brian McHale, characterises postmodernist fiction. Focusing on three novels from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, I demonstrate that the concept of scientific metafiction and its negotiation of concerns also discussed in science studies are central to Pynchon's work and crucial to its move beyond the epistemological questioning of historiographic metafiction and towards raising ontological concerns.
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