state university of new york press beautiful chaos chaos theory and metachaotics in recent american fiction nov 2000

[...]... financial earnings from brokering art Inseparable, the two sides of the picture and the two perspectives of the main characters depict the intricate relationship of order and chaos: chaos coming out of order, order coming out of chaos, order and chaos inherent in each other, or chaos neatly and inextricably enfolded within order Randomness and order are self-referential iterations, each reflecting and. .. explored chaos theory in both the Romantic and contemporary domains; Thomas Jackson Rice in Joyce, Chaos and Complexity considers sections of various works by James Joyce; Robert Nadeau in Readings from xii BEAUTIFUL CHAOS the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel, Susan Strehle in Fiction in the Quantum Universe, and N Katherine Hayles in The Cosmic Web, Chaos Bound, and Chaos and. .. the range of contemporary American fiction The very process of discovering chaotics and overturning established views of science and systems chimes with the emphasis in literature of the day on uncertainty and indeterminacy, free play of the signifier, and rewritings of various sorts Chaos theory has also lent itself, however, to those who seek to deny the relativistic effects of indeterminacy in literature... dynamic or stability theory, and is closely related to stochastic theory and catastrophe theory Of these theories, catastrophe theory and stochastics came first, then chaos theory, and finally complexity theory stressing the self-organization of chaos into order (Brady, Chaos and Emergence” 14–15), and the term chaotics is often used to talk about the implications of chaos theory in the broad cultural... metaphors for treatments of narrative Chaos theory often lies behind or underneath certain texts that take scientific systems as their theme and explore their roles in the reader’s understanding and interpretation of reality in general and of the principles and paradigmatic structures of social systems in particular Certainly, a number of authors have been attracted to this new paradigm In the last few decades,... issues of chaotics, break with conventional linear narrative forms, use chaotic patterns for structural purposes, and/ or embrace current rhetoric of chaos theory (including tropes of order and chaos) Many different forms of fiction can profit from a consideration of, and comparison with, chaos theory, and they are not limited to novels of excess (LeClair), actualist fiction (Strehle), cybernetic fiction. .. growth and order Although in contemporary nonscientific usage chaos has come to denote confusion and disorder, in contemporary understandings of science the word has an affinity with the original Greek: it suggests the paradoxical state in which irregular motion may lead to pattern and disorder and order are linked Indeed, in engineering, chaos theory is called stability theory that is, the study of. .. magnitude of the initial perturbation; and there xxiv BEAUTIFUL CHAOS are certain parameters or boundaries to the phenomena and certain ways in which one pattern unpredictably follows another In system theory and stochastic theory, the focus or point of such a trajectory is called an attractor, but in chaos theory the “representative point” of the catastrophe finds its “path” without hitting this trajectory... self-organizing biological, chemical, physical, cultural, and social systems These developments were enhanced by studies of switching in mathematics and phase transitions in chemistry and engineering, which explored the relation of stabilities and instabilities in various self-organizing systems Hermann Haken, among others, linked xvi BEAUTIFUL CHAOS several academic fields in considering these systemic instabilities... Although conceptions of chaos and order have circulated at least since the earliest narratives of Babylonian, Greek, Biblical, Hindu, and Chinese cultures, it was when James Gleick in 1987 published Chaos: Making a New Science that chaos theory became readily accessible to scholars of the arts Gleick’s breezy journalistic style and linear narrative traced the development of chaos theory in post–World War . h0" alt="" Beautiful Chaos