In this Book
- Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: Cornell University Press
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Hayles’s point is that the almost simultaneous appearance of interest in complex systems across many disciplines―physics, mathematics, biology, information theory, literature, literary theory―signals a profound paradigm and epistemological shift. She calls the new paradigm ‘orderly disorder.’ This is a timely, informative, and enormously thought-provoking book. — Nancy Craig Simmons ― American Literature
N. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary literature and critical theory and the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. She examines structures and themes of disorder in The Education of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and works by Stanislaw Lem. Hayles shows how the writings of poststructuralist theorists including Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Serres, and de Man incorporate central features of chaos theory.
Table of Contents
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- 1 Introduction: The Evolution of Chaos
- pp. xvii-28
- PART I SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
- pp. 29-30
- 6 Strange Attractors: The Appeal of Chaos
- pp. 142-174
- 7 Chaos and Poststructuralism
- pp. 175-208
- Selected Bibliography
- p. 296
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