Claim Missing Document
Check
Articles

Found 2 Documents
Search

Can Chaos Explain Tragic Fate? Othello and Oedipus Rex Revisited Ardana, Stefanus Galang
Lingua Susastra Vol 6, No 1 (2025)
Publisher : Departemen Bahasa dan Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.24036/ls.v6i1.413

Abstract

This paper employs chaos theory to analyze Shakespeare's Othello and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, contrasting traditional interpretations of tragedy with the insights offered by chaos theory. Challenging analyses based on tragic flaws, this study reveals how minor initial deviations—Iago's manipulations in Othello and the priestly vagueness in Oedipus Rex—generate cascading feedback loops leading to catastrophic outcomes. Utilizing Prigogine's theory of bifurcation and Paulson's information theory, the paper traces how ambivalent or incomplete information triggers these trajectories, identifying pivotal bifurcation points like the handkerchief in Othello and the Shepherd's revelation in Oedipus Rex. While Othello's conclusion shows systemic collapse, Oedipus Rex demonstrates a form of reorganization. This approach uniquely contributes to literary studies by challenging linear causality and illustrating how meaning emerges unpredictably from instability within structurally chaotic tragic systems, particularly offering a rigorous examination of Oedipus Rex through the lens of chaos theory, a novel approach in existing scholarship. The study demonstrates that tragedy in these plays is not merely about disorder but a system governed by it, where causality is nonlinear and indeterminate.
Apokalips Milik Siapa? Unfuturability dan Politik Futuritas Kolonial-Pemukim dalam Narasi Apokaliptik Barat Ardana, Stefanus Galang
Retorik: Jurnal Ilmu Humaniora Vol 13, No 2 (2025): Cultural Studies After the End of the World
Publisher : Sanata Dharma University

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.24071/ret.v13i2.12831

Abstract

This paper argues that reading Western settler-colonial apocalyptic narratives—including films, video games, and novels such as The Road, the Fallout series, Children of Men, and Interstellar—through the lens of unfuturability reveals their underlying political function. I distinguish between “apocalypse-as-genre,” the spectacular collapse imagined in these works, and “apocalypse-as-structure,” the slow violence already endured in places such as Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. The analysis identifies three recurring settler-colonial tropes that work to secure the future as a racially exclusive domain: the reimagining of land as an emptied frontier, the rebirth of the hunter-hero through righteous violence, and the salvation of the future through a settler adoption fantasy. These tropes function as a form of “white property” by controlling who inherits futurity. In response, unfuturability is proposed as both an analytic and an ethic: a political refusal of the colonial future that opens space for plural, relational worlds already being built through Indigenous land stewardship, Black mutual aid, and decolonial archival practice. By using unfuturability to name and critique these narrative patterns, this paper offers a framework for reading apocalyptic culture beyond the horizons secured by settler futurity.