Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-260) and index
Being in uncertainties : orderly disorder in postmodern American fiction -- Design and debris : John Hawkes's Travesty, chaos theory, and the swerve -- Discipline and anarchy : disrupted codes in Kathy Acker's Empire of the senseless -- American oulipo : proceduralism in the novels of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth -- Noise and signal : information theory in Don DeLillo's White noise -- The perfect game : dynamic equilibrium and the bifurcation point in Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association -- The excluded middle : complexity in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow -- The superabundance of cyberspace : postmodern fiction in the information age
Reading eight major contemporary authors through the lens of chaos theory, Conte offers new and original interpretations of works that have been the subject of much critical debate. Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden
