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While poststructuralist attacks against structured forms freed literature from the dominance of Aristotle’s canon, twentieth-century evolutions in physics and cosmology brought about a new world vision which also deeply influenced modern authors. If the universe was no longer Newtonian, linear and predictable, and if literature was to “imitate” this new reality, world-texts were also supposed to explore anarchical and complex landscapes. To be able to investigate these anti- structure texts, literary and art critics adapted analytical tools from mathematical and physical theories – modern literature was associated mainly with the theory of quanta, and postmodern literature with chaos theory. In this paper, I engage with some of the main mathematical and physical concepts used as instruments in literary analysis, such as non-Euclidian geometries, the field concept, relativity, entropy, uncertainty principles, fractals, chaos, strange attractors, etc.

Karl R. Popper's very respectable theory argues that civilization tends to limit the use of violence and opposes a state of chaos, madness, barbarism, and war. Empirically, this philosophical theory can be supported by at least (though not exclusively) a triad of arguments, which confirm that indeed law tends to curb the use of violence, even though it is not based exclusively on the force (and violence) of the sanction: (i) a legal philosophical argument, i.e. the theory of "international regimes"; (ii) a sociological one, i.e. the theory of social networks such as "Small-World Networks"; and (iii) a mathematical one, i.e. the theory of deterministic chaos applied to the phenomenon of sanction (also definable as coercive force, deterrence or even "just war"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]