Literary Criticism and the Systems Theory

Although I’m not really thinking that someone missed my weekly ramblings about all the innuendo that occasionally flutters from my brain through my finger tops into my blog, I still want to acknowledge towards those who do that I’m still alive and rambling.

I’m still one of those old fashioned guys who believe that the off line life should have precedence over my online presence. I know that this goes against all modern commercial and artistical practices, but when I spend too much time on the internet, it has a tendency to suck me into some wormhole that leaves me with no time to deal with the world outside the matrix (although my wife claims that I spend the bulk of my time in my own universe, which consists of a 100 sqm studio).

Last week I have been rubbing shoulders in Dublin with some readers of Here Comes Everybody’s Karma, which is my transcription of Finnegans Wake in plain English, larded with some self-made illustrations at the Bloomsday Festival in Dublin. Those who didn’t hear about it yet, can see a video presentation of this book by clicking on the cover below this paragraph.

I had some interesting encounters with a couple of literary critics in the margins of the Bloomsday festival, what caused me to drag up, polish, and reformat an old essay about a system theory approach of literary criticism.

This essay focuses on the mathematical structure of the driving forces behind the literary phenomena. If the ideal of the “unity of science”, bridging both diverse contents and cultural differences can be achieved at all, this will be done via mathematization.
A first advantage of this method of treating as an ensemble the totality of publications and their determinants is the elimination of many controversies in literature as to the causes of some sociological phenomena. In the history of literary theory these questions have been discussed to the point, not of the conversion of the disputants, but of the exhaustion of their faculties.
Yet when a synthetic view of information exchange, writing, publishing, distribution and social effects is taken, we see at once that each of the alternatives of the preceding questions contains a partial truth; that the sum of the partial truths is not the whole truth; that the proper weight and place of each partial truth may be specified; and that the ensemble of the determining conditions may be mathematically expressed.
A second advantage of the synthetic method is that it enables one to know when a literary problem has reached a solution. Here, a distinction should be made in the meaning of the word “solution” according as one sees it from the point of view of the mathematical, or of the synthetic method. The problem is solved by the mathematical method when there are as many independent equations as there are unknown quantities in the problem. From the point of view of the synthetic method, however, this is only half of the solution: over and above the presentation of the abstract simultaneous equations, proof must be supplied that the equations themselves may be empirically derived and, consequently, that the problem admits of a real solution.

Those among you who’re interested in reading more can download a free kindle copy of this essay on this Amazon link between 24 and 26 of June. Please leave a review after you finished.

I have a buzzy festival and exposition agenda ahead for the second part of this year, of which I’m hoping to find time later to communicate about on this blog.