Chaos and Order

图书信息

作者	N. Katherine Hayles
出版社	University of Chicago Press
ISBN	9780226230047
出版时间	2014-10-12
字数	69.1万
分类	进口书,外文原版书,文学,自传,回忆录

读书简介

The scientific discovery that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of such wide-ranging implications that it has attracted attention across a spectrum of disciplines, including the humanities. In this volume, fourteen theorists explore the significance for literary and cultural studies of the new paradigm of chaotics, forging connections between contemporary literature and the science of chaos. They examine how changing ideas of order and disorder enable new readings of scientific and literary texts, from Newton's Principia to Ruskin's autobiography, from Victorian serial fiction to Borges's short stories.N. Katherine Hayles traces shifts in meaning that chaos has undergone within the Western tradition, suggesting that the science of chaos articulates categories that cannot be assimilated into the traditional dichotomy of order and disorder. She and her contributors take the relation between order and disorder as a theme and develop its implications for understanding texts, metaphors, metafiction, audience response, and the process of interpretation itself. Their innovative and diverse work opens the interdisciplinary field of chaotics to literary inquiry.

目录

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Series Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science

I. Chaos: More than Metaphor

2. Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity

3. Fictions as Dissipative Structures: Prigogine’s Theory and Postmodernism’s Roadshow

4. The Chaos of Metafiction

5. The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order

II. Order: Revisioning Form

6. Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution

7. The Authorization of Form: Ruskin and the Science of Chaos

8. Linear Stories and Circular Visions: The Decline of the Victorian Serial

9. Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D.

III. Chaos and Order: Probing the Limits

10. Representation and Bifurcation: Borges’s Garden of Chaos Dynamics

11. Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem’s Alien Communications

12. Negentropy, Noise, and Emancipatory Thought

13. Michel Serres: In Search of a Tropography

Notes

Contributors

Index