Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
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Yona Dureau
Abstract
The question of complex systems is relatively new for critics today. Analyzing complex systems in Renaissance texts shows that the Christian kabbalistical concept of harmonia mundi led to an aesthetical development, reflecting the worldview of harmonious parallel worlds. Failure to perceive the esoteric text uniting apparently contradicting themes has often led Renaissance scholars to elaborate a theory of the instability of atmospheres characterizing the English Baroque. This article gives an example of a complex system in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra revealing that the Christian kabbalistical Hercules unifies contradicting metaphors and intertexts of the play, and reintegrates this work in a form of semantic stability more in harmony with the aesthetics of its time.
In the case of postmodern literature, contradictory intertexts appear as a device to deconstruct all values and logic previously established. With the study of a text structured by the optical questions around the refraction of light, this paper shows that in the case of Nabokov, the unifying system of apparently contradicting semantic systems is the underlying logic of scientific theory.
In Nabokov's text, failing to perceive the fundamental intertext of scientific debate leads one to assimilate Nabokov's writing to a form of postmodern deconstruction. Both cases studied tend to show a continuity of a form of aesthetics through different epistemological eras.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
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- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
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- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
- Semiosis in cognitive systems
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- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
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- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
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- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
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