Chaos Bound

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.

Love is a wild ride. After enduring months of torture at the hands of the Black Jacks MC, and betrayed by his own club, Holt “T-Rex” Savage, a junior member of the Sinner’s Tribe Motorcycle Club, will stop at nothing to get revenge. But falling for a beautiful woman with dangerous ties to his sworn enemy was never part of the plan... Raised by the Black Jacks, Naiya Kelly grew up fast, furiously, and with little to lose. But now that she’s put her MC days behind her, she is free to do what she wants—until she meets a man who imprisons her, body and soul. She swore she’d never give her heart to a biker, but Holt is the most passionate, protective man she’s ever known. But will Holt be forced to betray his one true love to exact his revenge?

The present volume is the first to address the interrelationship between Goethe’s scientific thought and work, his ideas on art and literary oeuvre, and chaos and complexity theories. The eleven studies assembled in it treat one or more elements or aspects of this interrelationship, ranging from basic concepts all the way to a model of an aesthetic-scientific methodology. In the process, the authors scrutinize chaos and complexity both as motif and motor of literary texts and nature within various contexts of past and present. The volume should be of interest to literary scholars, scientists, and philosophers of science, indeed, to all those who are interested in the continuities between the humanities and sciences, culture and nature.

This text describes how 18th-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically.

Thomas Rice compellingly argues that James Joyce's work resists postmodernist approaches of ambiguity: Joyce never abandoned his conviction that reality exists, regardless of the human ability to represent it. Placing Joyce in his cultural context, Rice first traces the influence of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He then demonstrates that, when later innovations in science transformed entire worldviews, Joyce recognized conventional literary modes of representation as offering only arbitrary constructions of this reality. Joyce responded in Ulysses by experimenting with perspective, embedding design, and affirming the existence of reality. Rice contends that Ulysses presages the multiple tensions of chaos theory; likewise, chaos theory can serve as a model for understanding Ulysses. In Finnegans Wake Joyce consummates his vision and anticipates the theories of complexity science through a dynamic approximation of reality.

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.

This publication reflects on the discussion on using chaos theory for the study of society. It explores the interface between chaos theory and the social sciences. A broad variety of fields (including Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Management, Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences) is represented in the book. The leading themes are: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, Social Connectionism and the Connectionist Mind, Social Institutions and Public Policy, and Social Simulations. The book includes the following topics: the relevance of the complexity-chaos paradigm for analyzing social systems, the usefulness of nonlinear dynamics for studying the formation and sustainability of social groups, the comparison between spontaneous social orders and spontaneous biological/natural orders, the building of Artificial Societies, and the contribution of the chaos paradigm to a better understanding and formulation of public policies.

This book differs from others on Chaos Theory in that it focuses on its applications for understanding complex phenomena. The emphasis is on the interpretation of the equations rather than on the details of the mathematical derivations. The presentation is interdisciplinary in its approach to real-life problems: it integrates nonlinear dynamics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, information theory, and fractal geometry. An effort has been made to present the material ina reader-friendly manner, and examples are chosen from real life situations. Recent findings on the diagnostics and control of chaos are presented, and suggestions are made for setting up a simple laboratory. Included is a list of topics for further discussion that may serve not only for personal practice or homework, but also as themes for theses, dissertations, and research proposals. Includes laboratory experiments Includes applications and case studies related to cell differentiation, EKGs, and immunology Presents interdisciplinary applications of chaos theory to complex systems Emphasizes the meaning of mathematical equations rather than their derivations Features reader friendly presentation with many illustrations and interpretations Deals with real life, dissipative systemsIntegrates mathematical theory throughout the text