Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction

Description

Today, we have forgotten that mathematics was once aligned with the arts, rather than with the sciences. Literary Infinities analyses the connection between the late 19th-century revolution in the mathematics of the infinite and the literature of 20th-century modernism, opening up a novel path of influence and inquiry in modernist literature. Baylee Brits considers the role of numbers and the concept of the infinite in key modernists, including James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. She begins by recuperating the difficult and rebellious German mathematician, Georg Cantor, for the broader artistic, cultural and philosophical project of modernism. Cantor revolutionized the mathematics of the infinite, creating reverberations across the numerical sciences, philosophy, religion and literary modernism. This 'modernist' infinity is shown to undergird and shape key innovations in narrative form, creating a bridge between the mathematical and the literary, presentation and representation, formalism and the tactile imagination. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Actual Infinities: Cantor’s Proofs and Modern Fiction The Missed Encounter Cantor’s Transfinite Mallarmé and Meillassoux: Fixing the Infinite Allegory and Enigma 2 The Aleph: Jorge Luis Borges and the Measure of Prose Supplanting the Symbol for the ‘Thing Itself’: Borges’s Ultraist Beginnings ‘Funes, His Memory’: A Transfinite Technogenesis of Perception ‘The Library of Babel’ ‘The Lottery of Babylon’ What is a Transfinite Allegory? 3 The Lemniscate: Infinite Shapes in the Work of Samuel Beckett A Mania for Symmetry: Molloy and the Continuous Deformation of Language Permutation and Division in Watt All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine: Imagination by Numbers 4 One: J.M. Coetzee and the Name of the Number ‘Literature in the Lap of Mathematics’: The Quantification of Style In the Heart of the Country: Freedom and Equality The Childhood of Jesus and Mathematical Nominalism Counting as One, Rather than Counting to One Conclusion – X: Literary Infinities after Zeno and Cantor Works Cited Index