Traces the relationship between the texts and obsessions of the Romantic and postmodern periods.
Arrow of Chaos navigates through postmodern coordinates such as chaos theory and fractals as well as literary and cultural theory, mapping the ongoing mutations of Romanticism in postmodern culture and the inklings of the postmodern already at work in Romanticism. The result is a “chaology of knowledge,” a study of the logic of chaos.
Ira Livingston’s reading of Romantic and postmodern texts-from poetic, political and scientific works to films and dreams-reveal surprising code shiftings within and among them. The resilience of Romanticism, Livingston argues, lies not in enforcing a single “master narrative” but in orchestrating these fluxes.Using theory and critical readings alongside a series of illustrative vignettes, Livingston portrays cultural history as a dynamic entity conserved by the continually renewed demands of order and disorder. By modeling ways to think through chaos and through the mutual deformations of Romanticism and postmodernity, Arrow of Chaos contributes to alternative alignments of knowledge across time and technique.