Michael Pollak wrote:
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> I think most of the American lit crit use of the term eventually traces
> back to him via Pynchon.
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Perhaps, but the work I had specifically in mind was a Harvard dissertation on Pope (I think the author's name was Thomas Edwards) around 1954. Chaos (ancient/medieval/renaissance/literary version) does descend at the end of the _Dunciad_:
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd,
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
(Dunc. IV, 653-56)
A week or so ago I quoted the lines on mathematics from the same passage. The chaos here is that of Othello's, "And when I love the not, chaos is come again," not that either of chaos-theory or of Russell's universal heat death -- though the latter (from "A Free Man's Worship") would be more appropriate. But the best commentary is probably provided by Book III of _Gulliver_ or the Digression on Madness in _Tale of a Tub_. No need for anachronisms or technical math or Big Bang cosmology to get the force of the poem.
There is _one_ modern activity that is true to the vision of horror in the _Dunciad_ -- the insistence (very loud on this list) that one must read and understand _everything_ in order to have a right to critiicize. That way lies the Daedlian fall into matter that horrified Swift and Pope. Either somehow there must be a way to dismiss most world views and political theories without knowing them or one must accept a plunge into twitching inactivity. Kenneth Burke is very good on this in his discussions (Grammar of Motives) of the liberal love of Committees to investigate. For example those who argue that all the evidence isn't in on global warming until the Atlantic laps at the foothills of Denver.
Carrol