Beautiful chaos : chaos theory and metachaotics in recent American fiction / Gordon E. Slethaug.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Slethaug, Gordon.

Series:

SUNY series in postmodern culture.

The SUNY series in postmodern culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Chaotic behavior in systems in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Beautiful Chaos is the first book to examine contemporary American fiction through the lens of chaos theory. The book focuses on recent works of fiction by John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone, all of whom incorporate aspects of chaos theory in one or more of their novels. They accomplish this through their disruption of conventional linear narrative forms and their use of strategic tropes of chaos and order, but also—and more significantly for an understanding of the interaction of science and fiction—through their self-conscious embrace of the current rhetoric of chaos theory.Since the publication of James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science in 1987, chaos theory has been taken up by a wide variety of literary critics and other scholars of the arts. While considering the relationship between chaos theory and recent American fiction, Beautiful Chaos details basic assumptions about orderly and dynamic systems and the various manifestations of chaos theory in literature, including mimesis, metaphor, model, and metachaotics. It also explains particular features of orderly and dynamic systems, including entropy, bifurcation and turbulence, noise and information, scaling and fractals, iteration, and strange attractors.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Dynamic Fiction and the Field of Action: Mimesis, Metaphor, Model,and Metachaotics

Orderly Systems: Growth, Competition, and Transgression

Entropic Crisis, Blockage, Bifurcation, and Flow

Turbulence, Stochastic Processes, and Traffic

Energy, Noise, and Information

Juxtapositional Symmetry: Recursion, Scaling, and Fractals

Iteration

Strange Attractors

Synoptic Study: “The Coded Dots of Life”

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-200) and index.

ISBN:

9780791491737

0791491730

OCLC:

50321483