Justin Cronin: “Baby, It’s Yu” – Einstein, Jung, One Really Awful Dream, and the Problem of Meaning in Fiction (January 2006)

In this lecture, Justin Cronin argues that meaning in fiction originates in “deep structure,” or the ways in which subsurface patterns of metaphor in a text are organized to replicate the living, physical world. Using the language of physics as he explores works by Alan Furst, Susan Minot, Virginia Woolf, and Michael Cunningham, Cronin juxtaposes the rigid or predictable “Newtonian” world of genre fiction with a richer set of relationships in “Einsteinian” fiction.