Fi-Sci

“Trauvitch’s immensely ambitious study demonstrates an unsung cognitive advantage of fictionality. Separable from generic fiction and even narrative, fictionality is a rhetorical mode that augments the power of analogy in helping us grasp what we at first don’t recognize. . . . A wonderful book, provocative in the best sense of earned provocation.” —H. Porter Abbott, author of Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable

“Brilliantly original, Fi-Sci presents a dazzling meta-cartography of the patterns that underlie both science and fiction, and how the recognition of such patterns can illuminate both. A tour de force that will surprise and delight transdisciplinary thinkers from both sides of the abyss.” —Vandana Singh, author of Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice

“Fi-Sci is fascinating and original. Trauvitch deconstructs the artificial binary between literature and science by referring both to the operations of language and rhetoric. A must-read for anyone interested in the role of narrative in science communication.” —Jon Hegglund, coeditor of Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature

Lays out a rhetorical approach to fictionality as key to understanding scientific phenomena that otherwise might be beyond imagination.

In Fi-Sci, Rhona Trauvitch melds literary and scientific thought to advance a theory of how narrative, and specifically fictionality, is one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding science, particularly those concepts that defy imagination. Centering her argument on a rhetorical approach to fictionality, she proposes that fiction uniquely offers a means of conceptualizing and understanding perplexing and counterintuitive scientific phenomena, such as recombinant DNA or quantum superposition: Through finding analogous patterns in fiction, we can open up new pathways to understanding. Put another way, our abilities to perceive strange and confounding science phenomena are bolstered and even enabled by our experiences with fiction.

Drawing on a range of theorists such as James Phelan, Gérard Genette, Erwin Schrödinger, and others in her analysis of texts by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Ursula K. Le Guin, Richard Powers, and many more, Trauvitch shows how literary forms—such as metafiction, metalepsis, and recursion—mirror and clarify complex scientific concepts including genetics, spacetime curvature, and quantum mechanics. In this way, she shows us how fiction is key to unlocking conceptual access to the indiscernible and inconceivable.

Rhona Trauvitch is Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Florida International University, where she specializes in cross-disciplinary analysis and analogical reasoning at the intersections of literature and STEM.

Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface

Introduction Pattern Mapping
Part 1 Biology
Chapter 1 Permutation
Chapter 2 Proliferation—Gametic Reproduction
Chapter 3 Proliferation—Clonal Reproduction
Part 2 Nonclassical Physics
Chapter 4 Warp
Chapter 5 Ambiguity
Chapter 6 Recursion
Coda Weave

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Variations on a Theme
Works Cited
Index