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PREFACE xi Mandelbrot sets that involve stochastic processes, unstable aperiodic behavior, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-organizing systems , and far from-equilibrium systems. Gleick admits that similar concepts were developed during the same period in the Soviet Union and such European research centers as the Max Planck Institute in Germany, but he basically presents the theory as an American enterprise. Indeed, while chaos theory is underpinned by late nineteenth- and early twentieth -century theories developed by Europeans—Planck’s theory that energy is not continuous but comes in small bursts or quanta, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty—which have affected scientific methods and research endeavors the world over, chaos theory is identified by Gleick as the product of a genuine American counterculture that only grudgingly was granted a place in the mainline scientific academy. It is perhaps this insistence on marginalization that gives chaos theory at least some of its appeal for the modern writer and reader of recent American literature. The idea that a few scientists in Santa Cruz and Los Alamos developed chaos theory in relative obscurity and sometimes with cobbled together equipment cast off by other computer researchers is the stuff that fuels the American dream of the underdog who does well against all odds, as N. Katherine Hayles has observed (Chaos Bound 146). That the castoff equipment at Santa Cruz had been used for digitized systems and that the new, slow-to-be-recognized research was initially related to analogue systems adds substance to the American dream of subverting authorized ways of doing things and bringing in smarter, more productive, and unconventional research. (It was, of course, the digitized system that ultimately made possible a great part of the research on instability.) Although it further confirmed the importance of science in all our lives, this alternative mode suggested that dominant views of science—if not science itself—could be contradicted, that it was not, as some thought, monolithic, orthodox, single-minded, or at one with itself, and that, therefore, it was available to the skeptical humanist. This desire to reassess traditional perspectives in science, technology, and related areas of life—to review and reconstruct centers and margins— meshes neatly with literature’s exploration of its heritage through chaotic perspectives. Harriet Hawkins in Strange Attractors has examined the relationship between the concepts and metaphors of chaos theory and the works of such early figures as Shakespeare and Milton; Ira Livingston in The Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernism has, as his title suggests , 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 BEAUTIFUL CHAOS xii 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 Order have begun to explore the interface between modern literature, literary theory, and theories of twentieth -century physics. Finally, William R. Paulson in The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information has explored energy, noise, information , and literary production. These works have demonstrated the ways in which various physical theories can help to review, reinterpret, and reinscribe language, text, self, and society, though none have specifically chosen to explore 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 and philosophy . Alexander Argyros, for example, uses chaos theory to disprove many of Derrida’s assumptions and promote a hierarchical evolutionary model with neither “metaphysical closure” nor “deconstructive demystification” (6). There are others such as Patrick Brady who with few qualifications go beyond Argyros’s position and view chaos theory as synthesizing, “relational ,” and “holistic” (“Chaos and Emergence” 5). When chaos theory was popularized by Gleick, the central idea of open, dissipative systems characterized by turbulence (rather than control and order) as the normal physical state corresponded to uncertainty as the principle inherent in the rapidly changing state of knowledge. Certainly this view was also part of the early movement in science called new or quantum physics which took relativity and uncertainty to be normative...

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