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PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR)

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How to Cite

Historiographic Metafictional Portraits of Twentieth Century Scientists in Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World

Abstract

The paper critically analyses Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) as a work of Historiographic Metafiction aiming to undermine the authority and veracity of scientific discourses hailing the individuals featured in the novel as men possessing an unparalleled genius unattainable for normal human beings, along with heaping praise on the scientific achievements. Labatut brings out their humanness, pulling no punches in his prose. Not stopping at that, he sheds light on the sinister side of scientific advancement, exposing all that these geniuses, knowingly or unknowingly, unleashed upon the world, the terrible price that science exacted from them. With some of the most significant leaps in the fields of science during the twentieth century at its nucleus, the novel views them from the atomic orbits around the nucleus. These individuals revolve like electrons around the nucleus of science. As the distance between the nucleus and the electron decreases, escaping the nucleus becomes harder and harder. The novel is structured similar to the concentric circles of an atom, with reality becoming more and more uncertain as one reaches deeper. The nucleus eventually proves to be Schwarzchild’s singularity, an abyss impossible to escape. Labatut exposes science to be a god less benevolent and infallible than it appears to be, making his work relative in the present context of a global pandemic.

Authors

  • Dr. Aamer Shaheen
  • Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
  • Mehran Ahmed
  • BS (Hons), Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
  • Sadia Qamar
  • Lecturer, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan

Keywords

Benjamin Labatut, Historiographic Metafiction, Postmodernism, Science, When We Cease to Understand the World

DOI Number

10.35484/pssr.2021(5-IV)54

DOI Link

http://doi.org/10.35484/pssr.2021(5-IV)54

Page Nos

714-725

Volume & Issue

v5-4

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Creative Commons License
Pakistan Social Sciences Review (PSSR) by RESEARCH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SMC-PRIVATE) LIMITED(ROSS) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://pssr.org.pk/

Pakistan Social Sciences Review (PSSR), Developed by M. Yaseen

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