The ends of metaphor

This study examines recent works of literary criticism and theory which make use of chaos theory, and analyses their explicit and implicit assumptions concerning interdisciplinary knowledge. Whether the prime motivation is to draw on the authority of science, to transgress the borderline between the disciplines in order to question the knowledge produced by them, or to gain an overarching transdisciplinary status for literary or cultural analysis, these texts reflect different conceptions of the knowledge produced by the sciences, by literary analysis, and even by literature itself. A detailed investigation of the writings on chaos theory and literature reveals within this seemingly narrow field a wide variety of epistemological assumptions, and comparing them can give us a clearer picture of what can and cannot be achieved by combining literary studies and the natural sciences.