Mediating Order and Chaos: The Water-cycle in the Complex Adaptive Systems of Romantic Culture

Voorkant
Rodopi, 2001 - 349 pagina's
This literature-centered study offers an interdisciplinary approach to Romantic culture. If is pioneering in that it employs the complexity method of anthropology. Recent literary studies employ the complexity/chaos theory adapted from the natural sciences; however, here is presented for the first time a complexity method taken from the social/human sciences. This complexity method is useful in mediating not only contradictions within Romanticism, but the chaos of contemporary theories concerning it. One of the intensifying literary debates is that between the so-called "Greens" and "Reds," naturalists and humanists.
Mediating Order and Chaos not only traces the split between nature and man to Romantic Culture but finds there, too, a Spinozian vision of man and nature in unity - thereby denying any naturalist/humanist split. This volume is of interest for those who wish to see essays in the holistic approach to culture. Centering on hydraulics, hydrology, and meteorology, this study examines literature, painting, music, economics, and the rhetoric of science, philosophy, and politics, it therewith demonstrates how the water cycle was transformed into a cosmic metaphor that mediated, in the form of several complex adaptive systems, between the chaos of too much change and that of not enough.

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Inhoudsopgave

PREFACE
1
METHOD MODEL AND SUBMODELS
7
SOURCE
69
FLOW
117
RECEPTACLE
199
LINK
267
CONCLUSION
325
PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
331
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY ON SECONDARY WORKS
342
Copyright

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Pagina 249 - And first one universal shriek there rush'd, Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash Of echoing thunder; and then all was hush'd, Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash Of billows; but at intervals there gush'd, Accompanied with a convulsive splash, A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony.
Pagina 103 - Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, GOD!
Pagina 208 - Mais s'il est un état où l'ame trouve une assiette assez solide pour s'y reposer tout entière , et rassembler là tout son être , sans avoir besoin de rappeler le passé ni d'enjamber sur l'avenir, où le temps ne soit rien pour elle , où le présent dure toujours, sans néanmoins marquer sa durée et sans aucune trace de succession...
Pagina 299 - I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast ; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Pagina 105 - Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree ; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

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