Faculty Letter of Support

The Chaos Theory Applied to French Literature (Excerpt)

The project she is undertaking is closely related to one of my principal research interests, chaos theory. Indeed, her project could well become a chapter, or the basis of a chapter, in a book I will begin working on this year. Her emphasis will be on Denis Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, which was written about 1776. I already have the material for my chapter on Voltaire, and have begun work on another chapter, on Montesquieu.

Chaos theory, which seeks the structure hidden beneath disorder, or apparent disorder, in nonlinear systems, has been applied to literature for less than a decade, and mostly to post-modern and contemporary texts. I have found, in my research on Voltaire, answers to certain problems that have seemed unsolvable up to now by traditional critical methods and by more recent theories, such as structuralism, reader response, cultural studies, and deconstruction. This approach will surely be one of the leading critical methods, when judiciously applied to appropriate texts (not all literary texts are nonlinear systems), for at least another decade.

My assistant will be able to make a substantive and important contribution to this field of investigation. I intend to guide her through the production of a document by the end of the summer that can be first of all the basis of a publishable article, and also (as indicated above) the basis of a chapter in a book I will be devoting to this topic.

Student Proposal