| Popis: |
This article focuses on Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association and its progressive views of science— self-organization and chaos theory in particular—masterfully nested within the novel’s narrative yarn. The study is grounded on Ilya Prigogine’s take on chaos theory —the theory of “dissipative structures” that bifurcate and self-organize in systems far from equilibrium (The End of Certainty 73), revealing a world with a capacity to renew itself rather than run down. The novel unveils new forms of order and self- organization that emerged from disorder, accommodating a highly dynamic, complex, indeterminate, and nonlinear world of interconnected structures and emergent potentialities, teeming with unpredictable evolutions. The framework of the analysis is strengthened with Whitehead’s process theory, underlining the dynamism and perpetual transformation of creation and its existential (in)stability for “[p]rocess is the becoming of experience” (Process and Reality 166). |
