Relativity, quantum uncertainty, and consciousness in twentieth century British literature

In the early and middle part of the twentieth century, British literature distinguished itself from the realist mode of fiction similar to the way in which physics broke with Newtonian mechanics. Many of the key literary works from this period all but eliminate the objective voice in favor of narratives that are remarkably close to their protagonists. This change in style creates a greater depth of character by providing access to both conscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings. It also creates a greater breadth. As in the theory of relativity where objects in space depend upon their relations to all other objects for their definition, characters in modernist works grow less and less extricable from their environments. Consequently, a relative and subjective understanding of reality replaces one that is absolute and objective.In addition to demonstrating how James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and Samuel Beckett's Endgame share the central concepts of Albert Einstein's relativity theories, this study also reveals the affinity these works have with quantum theories. These texts not only depict characters that are closely attached to the people and places around them, they often collapse boundaries between subjects and objects altogether, reflecting the interchanges that occur in the subatomic systems studied by quantum scientists. Finally, these authors' often ambiguous use of language exemplifies what Jacques Derrida has dubbed undecidability. Instead of synthesizing binaries, their works promote inexact couplings of oppositions that depend on one another for their definition but cannot be reconfigured into a unified whole, which further coincides with particular aspects of Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity. This project explores the ways in which the fields of twentieth-century science and British literature collectively reinvent our ideas of reason and consciousness.