The truth of uncertainty

by Edward L. Galligan

Postmodern critics fail to ask the truth-seeker's essential question, What does the evidence prove? Instead they trust the generalizations and slogans of ideologies to guide their interpretations. Attempting to be up-to-date and profound, these critics lose sight of the literature they are supposed to explore. The Truth of Uncertainty celebrates values commonly associated with modern, not postmodern, criticism, applying them to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. Galligan finds important implications for criticism in work from the physical sciences that are rarely touched on by American intellectuals, such as Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Likewise, he finds illumination in the works of novelists that American critics have largely ignored - Josef Skvorecky, George V. Higgins, Mary Lee Settle, Robertson Davies.