Quantum fiction: Relativity and postmodernism in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet".
Item
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Title
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Quantum fiction: Relativity and postmodernism in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet".
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Identifier
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AAI9959244
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identifier
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9959244
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Creator
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Young, Susan Helen Elizabeth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michael Timko
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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One of the most important developments in modern, and postmodern, literature has been the incorporation of the concepts, language and images of science. In writing The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell made an attempt to mediate between Einsteinian relativistic physics and literature. Durrell's uniqueness was in his openly declared strategy to use relativity as the controlling structural principle of the Quartet, and his belief that relativity and quantum theory could somehow be appropriated for literary purposes. In the preface to Balthazar, one of the Quartet's four novels, he says: "I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup mix of a continuum." This dissertation analyses Durrell's use of relativity as a unifying principle of the Quartet and evaluates his success in transposing the components of relativity onto the matrix of the novel form, not only as a structuring device, but in terms of language, metaphor, time, point of view, and accurate interpretation of the laws of relativistic physics. The discussion concludes with an examination of the ways in which Durrell's use of Einsteinian relativity in the Quartet establishes him as what I call a "bridge writer" between modernism and postmodernism, with the Quartet ultimately revealing itself to be more postmodernist than modernist in nature.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
