Remapping Reality : Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass).
Title:
Remapping Reality : Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass).
Author:
McCarthy, John A.
ISBN:
9789401202152
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (376 pages)
Series:
Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 97 ; v.v. 97
Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 97
Contents:
Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction: Getting to the Bottom of Things -- 1. Remapping the Terrain -- 2. Chaos and Complexity -- 3. Defining Terms -- 4. A Note On and For Readers -- 5. Organization -- Part One: Theoretical Encirclements -- Chapter 1 From Matter to Mind: Revolutions Real and Conceptual -- 1. Paradigm Change and Chaos: The Analysis of Position -- 2. The Ground of Immanence or Parsing Particles -- 3. Parsing the Brain: Cytoskeletons and the Limits of Computability -- 4. Getting It Together: Solitons, Wave Packets, and Brain -- 5. Attitude and Positionality -- Chapter 2 Imitating Nature - Gaining the Right Perspective -- 1. Thinking Aside and Creativity -- 2. More on Mimesis or Making Motion -- 3. Mimesis as an Interdisciplinary Undertaking -- 4. Attitude and Aesthetic Experience -- 5. Spaces, Gaps, Openings, Tensions: Mapping Reality -- 6. Creative Strategies -- Chapter 3 Grounding Creativity: Nietzsche and the New Universe -- 1. It's All in the Motion -- 2. The Total Economy of Life and the Nature of Genius -- 3. Quanta of Energy -- 4. Vision of the New Universe and Eternal Recurrence -- Chapter 4 Eden's Aftermath: The Nature of Evil -- 1. Rethinking Evil -- 2. The Fall from Harmonious Order -- 3. Evil According to Leibniz and Spinoza -- 4. Kant on Moral Character -- 5. Nietzsche, Consciousness, and the Centrality of Design -- 6. Evil in the New Scheme of Things -- Part Two: Literary Iterations -- Chapter 5 "A Highly Complex Matter": The Spirit of the Earth, Evil, and Creativity in Faust -- 1. Interpreting Faust: Connectionism -- 2. Revolutions: Goethe, Science, and the Novel of the Universe -- 3. Chaos and Creativity I: Spirits of the Earth -- 4. Chaos and Creativity II: Places and Spaces -- 5. Willful Acts, Natural Acts, Essential Tensions -- 6. The Fifth Element -- Chapter 6 Zarathustra - Life on Earth.
1. A Philosophical Novel - Philosophy as Dance -- 2. Life on the High Wire - Gravity as the Devil -- 3. The Gateway -- 4. The Snake and the Shepherd -- 5. Chaos and Autopoiesis -- 6. The Cult of the Surface and the Need to Interpret -- 7. Writing as Ordering -- 8. On the Creative Attitude -- Chapter 7 The Tin Drum: Myth and Reality, or The Eternal Return -- 1. Planting Grass -- 2. Reality and Modern Myth Making: Science and Fiction -- 3. Plotting (His)story: Who's Oskar and What's He Doing Here? -- 4. Oskar: Nietzschean Gnome or Goethean Earth Spirit? -- 5. The Art of Drumming: Of Mothers and Moths -- 6. Sex unto Death -- 7. The Black Wicked Witch -- 8. Escalator Thoughts, or The Terrible Basic Text homo natura -- 9. Metaphysical Geometry: The Shapes of Reality -- 10. The Grammar of Biology -- 11. Summing Up: On Being Creative -- Epilogue: Emergence, Horizons, Continuance -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional "cultures" of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a "third culture." By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity.Throughout this inquiry certain nodal points emerge to bond the argument cogently together and create new meaning. These anchor points are the notion of movement inherent in all forms of existence, the changing concepts of evil in the altered spaces of reality, and the creative impulse critical to the literary work of art as well as to the expanding universe. This ambitious undertaking is unified through its use of phenomena typical of chaos and complexity theory as so many leitmotifs. While they first emerged to explain natural phenomena at the quantum and cosmic levels, chaos and complexity are equally apt for explaining moral and aesthetic events. Hence, the title "Remapping Reality" extends to the reconfigurations of the three main spheres of human
interaction: the physical, the ethical, and the aesthetic or creative.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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