Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior & the Arts

Man's Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham, Professor of English at Univ. of Pennsylvania,
later Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
South Carolina, is his much neglected 1967 breakthrough analysis of behavior and the arts.
Cultural criticism has been too obsessed with the rage for order to be able to grasp
the import of Peckham's search for "some human activity, which serves to break up orientations,
to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order, to prepare the individual to observe
what the orientation tells him is irrelevant, but what may be very relevant."
This book is destined to force a sharp turn in critical cultural studies, because it addresses
the rage for chaos in traditional "high culture," not just in popular culture.