A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation

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The arc of Western civilization has always driven toward mastering the world through reason, will, craft, and objectivity. Yet shadowing this arc is another that suggests we can know more of the world through non-rational means-through spontaneity, intuition, instinct, and subjectivity. "A Taste for Chaos" explores this undercurrent of spontaneity in literature and the arts. It identifies a new metagenre where improvisation rules: texts that claim to have been written without effort or craft, like an idea that hits you in the shower, each a challenge to the mainstream, dominant culture. It argues that while once written from the margins, improvisations make up much of the Western Canon's center: John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Laurence Sterne's" Tristram Shandy," William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," James Joyce's "Ulysses," ThomasMann's "Dr. Faustus." It also offers close readings of C.G. Jung's "Red Book" and Ian McEwan's" Saturday."