Troy Camplin

In literary works as in architecture, form follows function. There are clear differences among novels, epics, lyrics, and plays, and what the author wishes to say determines which genre works best. The Night of January 16th could only be written as a play; The Fountainhead could only be written as a novel; Anthem could only be written as a novella. Using the recent work by Frederick Turner, Epic: Form, Content, and History, the author attempts to demonstrate that Atlas Shrugged is an epic in the tradition of The Iliad, Moby Dick, and Lord of the Rings.

The Modern Era promoted a dualistic world of scientific determinism and spiritual freedom. This began with Descartes, and Newtonian deterministic physics and Kant's noumenal and phenomenal worlds strengthened it. Marx divided our spirit in two, and postmodernism separated people into their own individual worlds. This reflects the view of an entropic world slipping into destruction. Reflecting this, the arts swung between forms of naturalism and romanticism. A new scientific paradigm challenges this view. Chaos theory shows the world is not deterministic; game theory shows restraints create freedom; information theory shows information creates structure; complex systems theory shows entropy can create order; J. T. Fraser's umwelt theory of time unifies these. They show the world is unified and diverse, deterministic and free, and more in line with Nietzsche's philosophy than is postmodernism. Using Fraser's theory of time on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra shows its validity, and how Nietzsche's philosophy prefigures the current scientific paradigm, once we understand Eternal Return as fractal geometry and Will to Power as strange attractors. Recent anthropology shows humans have more instincts than other animals. A theory of how humans acquired language is suggested, using the theories of neoteny and new instincts evolving from instinct-blending. Humans know the world through instincts, including language, and rituals, including art and literature, which order the world and emphasize its fractal patterns and rhythms. If this is the case, long literary works should show fractal distribution of theme-words. Several words in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure were analyzed, and the fractal distribution of several theme-words demonstrated. This suggests a way to analyze longer works of literature by searching for fractal word patterns to discover themes, leading to analysis of those words. The presence of fractal word patterns supports the view of art and literature as fractal systems with emergent properties. I thus recommend a new literature of tragedy, which more accurately reflects this world view