Science, technology, and the humanities in recent American fiction

Subject: Twenty-one essays by distinguished scholars from Germany and the United States offer an informative tour d’horizon of the complex interrelations between science and literature and demonstrate that contemporary American fictions provide numerous bridges which link what, half a century ago, C. P. Snow could still diagnose as ”Two Cultures” separated by mutual ignorance and hostility. The broad spectrum of topics ranges from a Hegelian reading of speed in recent U. S. fiction to the relation between performative code and figurative language in American literature, from literary explorations of network theory to fictional comments on risk assessment, from tales of an intelligent materialism in the age of artificial life to an exploration of technoromanticism and the limits of representationalism, and from versions of ground zero literature to the autopoiesis of American fiction. Among the authors whose texts are discussed in detail are Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Richard Powers, Stephen Wright, Steven Millhauser, Carl Djerassi, and Colson Whitehead.