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Michael Patrick Gillespie, The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gainsville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2003. 140 pages.
One of the fundamental ideas of chaos theory is the "butterfly effect," first proposed by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s: a single, small event may yield exponentially enlarged effects, just as the single flap of a butterfly's wings may produce vast, unpredictable ramifications in weather patterns far away. Theorists of literature and culture who derive their conceptual framework from chaos theory are now performing the butterfly effect: a few suggestions on the part of certain physicists and biologists have inspired an exponentially growing literature of metaphorical applications in faraway fields. The Aesthetics of Chaos makes the salutory attempt to restrain, summarize, and unify the multivarious aesthetic theories of chaos. What is offered is not only a series of readings of disparate texts analyzed through the concepts provided by chaos theory, as is the case with most "chaotics" or poetics of chaos, but a generalized theory of reading and textual meaning that hails an ongoing "paradigmatic shift" (110) from linear to nonlinear thinking, from "cause-and-effect logic" to unpredictability and the logic of catastrophes, from a "Cartesian" and "Newtonian" paradigm to one based in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, from restrictive univalence to "multiple interpretive potential" (18), and from interpretive exclusiveness to inclusiveness. Without limiting his material to postmodern narrative, which has been the most fertile ground for studies in "chaotics"-his analysis encompasses readings of Joyce, fairy tales, Beowulf, Job, and Wilde-and without falling into the trap of elaborating exact correspondences between scientific concepts and their literary applications, Gillespie uses the scientific framework to provide a broad and ambitious theorization of reading and of the nature of the literary text.
It is a merit of The Aesthetics of Chaos to make explicit its own lineage through the history of literary theory and not only its derivation, from nonlinear dynamics. In the first chapter, entitled "How Do We Talk About What We Read?", Gillespie simultaneously traces his descendcnce from Pater, Wilde, Barthes, and reader-response theorists, and indicts a wide range of twentieth-century critics for their "exclusionary linearity" (9) and general critical "determinism." Even Deconstruction, in presupposing the center it proposes to smash, succumbs to (traditional) binary thinking and...