Simplicity and complexity

the long version

Simplicity and Complexity: Pondering Literature, Science, and Painting is about simplicity and complexity, order and disorder, as seen through the lenses of fiction, the sciences, and works of art. Floyd Merrell offers a nonmathematical account of chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the physics of complexity insofar as they are relevant to crucial facets of literature and painting created over the past century. Though his account is informal, he addresses technical concepts and philosophical questions, and sheds new light on the authors and painters he discusses. His interdisciplinary approach is within the mainstream of postmodern practices, yet it criticizes the tendency toward facile conclusions and sweeping generalizations regarding relations between the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. It brings an array of disciplines under an umbrella that is protective of particular theories, concepts, methods, and practices, while revealing connecting threads in the tenuously linked web of all human endeavors to know the product of the mind and of the world.