Abstract

Chapter 3 begins by borrowing and adapting a methodological principle from Einstein's theory of special relativity, that all (narrative) viewpoints should be described in rigorously physical terms. Pursuing such a "physics of narrative" through a variety of textual examples-Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Jack Williamson's pulp novel Legion of Time, Fritz Leiber's In the Big Time, Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time, and even Einstein's own correspondence with Erwin Schrödinger about the famous "cat in the box" example-the chapter shows how time travel fictions can be read as depicting the fundamental scenography of storytelling itself. In essence, time travel stories are literal representations of the superspace or "hyperspacetime" required to comprehend any narrative progression through space and time, and therefore already constitute a complex narrative theory in situ.

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