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- Title
"Irreversible Torpor": Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction.
- Authors
LATHAM, PETER
- Abstract
Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade
- Subjects
ENTROPY in literature; SUBURBS in literature; SOMETHING Happened (Book); RABBIT Is Rich (Book : Updike); SUBURBANITES; CARVER, Raymond, 1938-1988; UPDIKE, John, 1932-2009; HELLER, Joseph, 1923-1999
- Publication
Journal of American Studies, 2020, Vol 54, Issue 1, p131
- ISSN
0021-8758
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0021875818000956