Leibniz

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Entire books have been written about the complicated controversy over the invention of the calculus. In the 1670s, Leibniz had seen various mathematical ideas that Newton had circulated but not yet published. Nearly forty years later, after both men had published their versions of the calculus, followers of the Englishman began publicly accusing the German of stealing. Newton had a legion of supporters making the case for his priority while Leibniz stood almost alone. And he grappled with the Newtonians on a wider range of issues as well. Leibniz opposed Newton’s views on motion and gravity, and on the nature of space and time. Leibniz founded, in his own words, “a new science of dynamics,” that challenged and improved on Newton’s understanding of the laws of motion, and he claimed to have been the first to have “explained the notion of force.” Some two centuries later, Albert Einstein, commenting on the conflicting views Newton and Leibniz had on fundamental questions of physics, remarked that Leibniz was groping in the right direction. Einstein wrote in 1954 that Newton’s view of space was one of his “greatest achievements” and “in the contemporary state of science, the only possible one, and particularly the only fruitful one,” but that Leibniz’s resistance to it, while “supported by inadequate arguments,” was “intuitively well founded” and “actually justified.”

-- Marc E. Bobro in The New Atlantis

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Getting Better

Well, I'd say that I am a good 80, 85% this morning. It helps that I slept for over four hours straight, something that only occurs a few times a year now, even when I am not getting beaten up by a flu virus. I still get a little dizzy easily when I move a bit quickly, and I still a feel a little weakened. There still burns a trace of fever. That cough is still with me, but it is no longer the overwhelming, domineering bully that it has been the past few days. It is more like that awkward, annoying kid in glasses who insists on tagging along as though he were one of the guys.

Auto-Fiction

We have an article that offers up a little provocation by pronouncing postmodern fiction to be dead. Long live, auto-fiction! Which is essentially memoirist self-love. It is a story of the artist sharing what it is to be an artist, a künstlerroman. I don't know. I think Nabokov said such represents the weakest form of literary art. I mean, this is something that even I can write, though no one would pay me to read my narcissistic musing. I figure this is why God gave us blogs.

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What’s happening is that new novels — like the abovementioned 10:04, The Wallcreeper, and My Struggle — are redistributing the relation between the self and fiction.

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No, autofiction isn’t new. It could even be argued that it’s as old as literature itself, especially if you consider something like Hesiod’s Works and Days an autofiction. But it’s clear that what previously defined (most) autofictional novels was the tension between the real and the unreal, the “made up” and the “truthful.” (And this perhaps why critics can’t seem to let this debate go.) The new class of autofictions, on the other hand, having passed through modernism’s Joycean and Proustian portraits of artists, as well as the defiant relativism of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory, eschews the entire truth vs. fiction debate in favor of the question of how to live or how to create. Or, to quote the title of another excellent, recent autofiction by Sheila Heti: How Should a Person Be?

-- Jonathon Sturgeon, "2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction" at Flavor Wire.com

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