Virtual Realities and Chaos: The Fictions of Nicole Brossard, William Gibson, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and Others

Abstract

This article addresses the literary avant-garde in American Fiction and focuses on the uses of narrative disjunction, dialogism, and multistability in perception in the works of a handful of authors including Nicole Brossard, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Leonard Cohen, Kurt Vonnegut jr., Margaret Laurence, Don DeLillo and Michael Ondaatje. More specifically, this analysis considers narrative models that re-define “fiction” both as form and genre with direct reference to the inter-face of electronic culture and the creative process, or, techne and physis. A theory regarding Virtual Reality and the de-stabilization of meaning is forwarded as are comments on theorists of media and culture including McLuhan, Ong, Negroponti, and De Kerckhove among others. The second half of this paper applies Fractal and Chaos theory to the feminist fiction of the award-winning novelist, Nicole Brossard.