Chance and complexity in narrative

Le résumé fourni par la source

The five contributions to this chapter bear witness to the shifting outlooks, in complex environments, with regard to the relations between chance and narrative. They discuss how narratives can be seen as the product of a meaning-generating resistance between complexity in nature and cognitive processes or, alternatively, how the complexity of narrative forms is confronted with the complexity of their production and experience in various contexts. Among the topics discussed are “organized chaos” as a source not only of meaningfulness in art but also of chance and novelty; the epistemological gap between environment and cognition through which narrative form is imposed; narrative as complexity system characterized by irreversibility, bifurcation points and dissipative structures; contingency in the cinematic medium that reinforces the tension between registering chance, the reality of life as it happens, and the structuring of chance through narrative. The chapter ends by suggesting that the contributions are bound together by three “entropy flavours”: how chaos, disorder and uncertainty are perceived, sometimes with an element of surprise; how “noise” in a complex system is transformed into a semantic explosion; and how the search for complexity in randomness separates contingencies into “aleatory” and “organized” forms of complexity.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.