Implications: Strange attraction and phantom action between literary folds.
Item
-
Title
-
Implications: Strange attraction and phantom action between literary folds.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3310647
-
identifier
-
3310647
-
Creator
-
Loots, Christopher.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
-
Date
-
2008
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Literature, Modern
-
Abstract
-
Phantom action refers to a phenomenon in quantum physics whereby distinct particles become entangled such that despite any future empirical space-time between them, they behave as one. Strange attraction refers to a computer-rendered visualization of interconnecting macrocosmic systems in nature, a visualization revealing a deep and complex patterning informing the apparently random chaos of the natural world. Both notions suggest that the heterogeneity of our natural world is simultaneously shadowed by an a priori indivisibility of all heterogeneous things---be they atoms, bodies, texts, et cetera. As such, both notions echo what has long been the concern of numerous philosophers and writers: intuiting and communicating the implications of such simultaneous fragmentation and interconnectivity, of how the one and the many might be inextricably interwoven, in ways ultimately un-traceable through analysis and measurement; and what if anything such implications might mean.;In this study, I read across the sciences and humanities and sound strange attraction and phantom action with Deleuze's notion of the fold; with his sense of the way in which all things are less in a state of distinct being than in an interweaving process of becoming as/through an infinite series of pleats. Pascal and Kant's notions of infinity and sublimity are thereafter woven into my reading of Deleuze, as much as with my reading of Bohr and Bohm's complementary interpretations of phantom action. Altogether, I show how this weave-work of cross-disciplinary ideas arouses what Prigogine calls "new spacetime structures" that provide alternate ways to critically inquire toward an "event of between-ness" that problematizes a Cartesian dichotomy. To this effect, I read Emerson, Whitman, and Melville in light of these new cross-disciplinary models. Following that, I read Hemingway's work through a concept from Japanese religio-esthetics (ma), which specifically connotes a meaningfully empty/silent interval between and connecting seemingly disparate things. Finally, through the writing of Haruki Murakami, I explore some implications of hope and affect implicit in the "event of between-ness" toward which these new space-time structures and my literary treatments gesture: a hope and affect only enabled by the threshold which seems to separate heterogeneous atoms, bodies, texts---things.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
