Stories of Chaos

Reason and its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism
Cover of the book Stories of Chaos by Nick Davis, Taylor and Francis
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Author: Nick Davis ISBN: 9780429791390
Publisher: Taylor and Francis Publication: May 23, 2019
Imprint: Routledge Language: English
Author: Nick Davis
ISBN: 9780429791390
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Publication: May 23, 2019
Imprint: Routledge
Language: English

First published in 1999, this volume re-examines narrative design in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, King Lear and Paradise Lost. Written in a period newly set on finding practical application for available systems of reasoning, these texts confront in their different ways reason’s absolute limitation in the face of a Real which it cannot adequately represent to itself or recruit to its own purposes. An influential model for the staging of such a confrontation was the mythic, cosmological narrative of Plato’s Timaeus. In their rewriting of Plato’s narrative the English texts deploy but also destabilize the ancient conceptual polarization of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ or ‘chaotic’, rethought in the terms offered by their period’s innovatory practices of reasoning. The study establishes the critical importance of telling a story of chaos by comparing the narrative method of its chosen texts with that adopted by Freud and Lacan as a means of reflection on the psychoanalytic encounter with an ultimately chaotic Real.

This book has unusual interdisciplinary scope, and offers historically grounded, theoretically informed new readings of four major early modern English literary texts.

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First published in 1999, this volume re-examines narrative design in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, King Lear and Paradise Lost. Written in a period newly set on finding practical application for available systems of reasoning, these texts confront in their different ways reason’s absolute limitation in the face of a Real which it cannot adequately represent to itself or recruit to its own purposes. An influential model for the staging of such a confrontation was the mythic, cosmological narrative of Plato’s Timaeus. In their rewriting of Plato’s narrative the English texts deploy but also destabilize the ancient conceptual polarization of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ or ‘chaotic’, rethought in the terms offered by their period’s innovatory practices of reasoning. The study establishes the critical importance of telling a story of chaos by comparing the narrative method of its chosen texts with that adopted by Freud and Lacan as a means of reflection on the psychoanalytic encounter with an ultimately chaotic Real.

This book has unusual interdisciplinary scope, and offers historically grounded, theoretically informed new readings of four major early modern English literary texts.

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