• 영어영문학
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.619-639
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• 2009

In his 1993 stage play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories to dramatize the difficulty in predicting the future and in describing the past. Arcadia tracks the archaeological efforts of two present-day literary critics, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, as they attempt to piece together the events that occurred at a large country house called Sidley Park, from 1809 to 1812. While employing a variety of historical and cultural references to the changes taking place in British landscape gardening around the early nineteenth century, the play also turns around the intuitive-romantic versus rational-classical dichotomy represented by Hannah, and present in its discussion of science and the recoverable/irrecoverable past. Stoppard's use of chaos theory as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those involved in biographical/bibliographical literary research suggests that unsubstantiated assumption can result in the construction of its subject, rather than in its recovery. This paper explores the way in which Stoppard uses scientific concepts, particularly the chaos theory, as a metaphor for human life and behaviour, and how he successfully describes the dilemmas and contradictions of life in so doing. Influences from his famous British predecessors, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, are evident, but Stoppard transcends both playwrights and crafts a dramatic style distinctively his own. The combination of wit, comedy, intellectual depth, intriguing ideas, literary allusions, scientific concepts, metaphors, and cultural references, all combine to make Arcadia a dramatic edifice that will stand the test of time.