Project MUSE®: Style - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Style.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 50 (2016) through current issueLatest Articles: StyleTWOProject MUSE®Style2374-66290039-4238Latest articles in Style. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Goldilocks in Outer Space, or: An Odd Conjunction That Makes Perfect Sense
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989600
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This special issue arises from the unexpected boon of an unlikely pair: fictionality and science. "Unexpected," because what could this partnership possibly offer beyond genre fiction that features science? The key to the answer involves a rhetorical approach to fictionality.Rhetoric is the art of using language and/or other signs as a means to an end—to inspire and persuade; to provoke and beguile. At times, we intend the signs we use rhetorically to be understood as instances of fictionality: we invent something to get our audience to consider nonactual states of events, to imagine things that are not real (Gammelgaard et al. 7)—and we do so nondeceptively. Picture Adam and Anton hiking in a redwood forest. Adam
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallGoldilocks in Outer Space, or: An Odd Conjunction That Makes Perfect Sense2026-05-12text/htmlen-USGoldilocks in Outer Space, or: An Odd Conjunction That Makes Perfect Sense2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®234472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12From Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping to Literary Interpretation: The Whodunit Plot and Quantum Superposition in David Lodge's Thinks …
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989601
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Without knowing it, I used fiction-science pattern mapping as early as 2012, when I taught my first course, "Science & Technology in Literature." Because my students had little science training, it seemed intuitive to explain scientific concepts using patterns in the fiction we were reading. But it was only 11 years later, reading Rhona Trauvitch's "Mapping with Fi-Sci" (2023), that I consciously recognized the pedagogic value of using fictionality to overcome barriers to "science learning" (Trauvitch 81). The fi-sci framework also marks a refreshing reversal of the prevailing winds of cross-disciplinary transfer in Literature and Science Studies, which blow most often from science to literature, rarely the other
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallFrom Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping to Literary Interpretation: The Whodunit Plot and Quantum Superposition in David Lodge's Thinks …2026-05-12text/htmlen-USFrom Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping to Literary Interpretation: The Whodunit Plot and Quantum Superposition in David Lodge's Thinks …2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®791742026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Writing Modern Science with Fictionality: Understanding Benjamín Labatut's Generic Experimentation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989602
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After its publication in 2019 and its English translation in 2020, Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (originally titled "Un verdor terrible") received immediate critical attention, not least because of how it straddles the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. The book revolves around groundbreaking scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, including the theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Haber–Bosch process; it features historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Grothendieck, and Erwin Schrödinger and events such as the Battle of Ypres and the 1927 Solvay Conference. However, Labatut chooses to publish the book as "fiction" and states
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallWriting Modern Science with Fictionality: Understanding Benjamín Labatut's Generic Experimentation2026-05-12text/htmlen-USWriting Modern Science with Fictionality: Understanding Benjamín Labatut's Generic Experimentation2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®865712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Fictionality Fighting Superstition—Early Danish Novelists' Engagement with Science
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989603
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In my homeland, there are quite a few people of both genders who freely talk about their interactions with gnomes and huldras and swear on their eternal soul that they have been spellbound: dragged into hills and caves by the subterraneans. The simplemindedness of these people, which has provided material and plot for the novel, is ridiculed through the hero of the story, Niels Klim (Holberg "Tredje Levnetsbrev" 10–11).1Ludvig Holberg's Niels Klim (1741) (originally written in Latin and entitled Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum) is the first novel ever written by a Danish-Norwegian author. Taking inspiration from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726)—and a long tradition of travel writing2—the novel introduces
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallFictionality Fighting Superstition—Early Danish Novelists' Engagement with Science2026-05-12text/htmlen-USFictionality Fighting Superstition—Early Danish Novelists' Engagement with Science2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®1113542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Fiction, Science, and Multiple Dualities in Andrew Porter's "The Theory of Light and Matter": An Experiment in Rhetorical Interpretation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989604
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Can the form of an essay in narrative theory and interpretation become integral to its content?Andrew Porter titles a 2008 short story "The Theory of Light and Matter" but does not directly refer to the theory in the story itself.Porter does mention four giants of quantum physics: Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.Porter gives Dirac the most prominence.Dirac is famous for bringing together Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics and for discovering antimatter.1Antimatter is more than a theoretical possibility, but the universe has matter–antimatter asymmetry: there is far more matter than antimatter.Dirac's work on antimatter prepares the way for Hugh Everett's many-worlds
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallFiction, Science, and Multiple Dualities in Andrew Porter's "The Theory of Light and Matter": An Experiment in Rhetorical Interpretation2026-05-12text/htmlen-USFiction, Science, and Multiple Dualities in Andrew Porter's "The Theory of Light and Matter": An Experiment in Rhetorical Interpretation2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®612402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Lyricality, Fictionality, and Scientific Thought in Contemporary Opera
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989605
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Narrative theorists have explored fictionality across both narrative and non-narrative contexts using a range of approaches and definitions. Dorrit Cohn, in "Signposts of Fictionality," develops a "criteria of fictionality from within the confines of narratology itself" and, thus, approaches the concept as an exclusively narrative concern (776). For Cohn, fictionality describes qualities and characteristics of fictional narrative. Richard Walsh shifts from Cohn's ontological sense of fictionality to see it as a rhetorical mode that engages readers' imaginations and shapes their textual engagement. Yet, despite unlinking fictionality from the genre of fiction, Walsh notes that fictionality "is almost inherently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallLyricality, Fictionality, and Scientific Thought in Contemporary Opera2026-05-12text/htmlen-USLyricality, Fictionality, and Scientific Thought in Contemporary Opera2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®841612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12Infinite Jest's Reconfiguration: Delayed Disclosure and Systems Science
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989606
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Conversations in narrative theory have recently turned to science, asking, "How can novelistic techniques contribute to an understanding of science?" This article considers that question through Infinite Jest, a highly scientific novel that draws from a dizzying array of disciplines: neuroscience, biology, chemistry, ecology, optics, and even speculative nuclear physics. Not only does Infinite Jest seek to educate readers about these disciplines, but more importantly it works—by its structure—to educate readers in the how of science, by delivering a crucial piece of information very late in the novel—five hundred pages in. This delayed disclosure prompts readers to reconfigure existing knowledge within new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallInfinite Jest's Reconfiguration: Delayed Disclosure and Systems Science2026-05-12text/htmlen-USInfinite Jest's Reconfiguration: Delayed Disclosure and Systems Science2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®935172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12AI as Character: Real Patterns in Fictive Interactions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989607
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has once again become—after decades of alternating springtimes and winters since the 1950s (see Mitchell)—a focal point of divided opinion, lofty promises, and deep anxieties. This article, however, focuses on AI not merely as a critical object of discussion but as a fictional object of relations1: a fictive agent that users imaginatively co-build and coordinate with—through and for scaffolded interactions and patterns of distributed agency. Rather than fixating on the hypothetical future of AI's emergent consciousness and singularity, I propose we attend to the existence and working of the real, already observable patterns that emerge from our fictive engagements with these systems and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/680/image/coversmallAI as Character: Real Patterns in Fictive Interactions2026-05-12text/htmlen-USAI as Character: Real Patterns in Fictive Interactions2026-05-122026TWOProject MUSE®1651682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-12