ABSTRACT
Few branches of science have proven more readily and usefully adaptable to the interests of literary critics than quantum theory. This previously obscure field experienced a burst of popular interest in the second half of the 1970s, following the successes of New Age popularizations The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra, and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav. Since that time, numerous quantum phenomena have been assigned literary parallels: “complementarity corresponds to the oxymoron, holism to the synecdoche, fusion of identities to the metaphor and the shifting of identity to the metonymy. The observer-participation has its counterpart in the problem of interpretation” (Vanderbeke 253-4). Just as, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, “the very act of observation influences the observed results,” so in certain literary texts “the act of communication influences the concepts and descriptions being communicated” (Booker 581). The waveparticle duality is in one critic’s view a challenge to “the Aristotelian logic of identity that informs all Western metaphysics” (Best 199); for another, it brings a new perspective to theories of mimesis and semiosis: “Mimesis, because it emits bits of new information, resembles a corpuscular description, and semiosis, because it repeats the same information or an invariant theme, is wavelike” (Sporn 212). Even the esoteric Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment can be appropriated for literary-theoretical purposes, as “[p]erhaps the most unsettling evidence of the invisible (or ‘occulted’) presence of the other, or the apparently absent” (Froula 303).
