Adding Mathematics to Modernist Studies

In Modernism, Fiction, and Mathematics, Nina Engelhardt shows that modernist studies scholars should attend to mathematics, a discipline that experienced radical transformations and internal divisions in the early twentieth century. Far from the most realist or authoritative science, mathematics, Engelhardt argues, shares with literature a common investment in form, symbolic abstraction, and epistemological flexibility. The book's chapters examine how Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Thomas Pychon's Against the Day and Gravity's Rainbow use mathematics to explore modernist formal experimentations and epistemological insecurities. Modernism, Fiction, and Mathematics locates the presence of mathematics in modernist literature and postmodernist reconsiderations of modernism, demonstrating that a wider variety of interdisciplinary engagements will be productive for modernist studies.