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James Bunn
Department of English
Office: 539 Clemens
Phone: 645-2575 ext. 1059
E-mail:
bunn@acsu.buffalo.edu
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James H. Bunn has taught at the University at
Buffalo since 1969. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Vice
Provost for Undergraduate Education, and a founder of the Undergraduate College.
He helped form a General Education program that has been widely emulated among
large universities since the late 1980s.
He has written essays and books about eighteenth-century
studies, English romanticism and semiotics. In recent years he has begun to
work in the philosophy of science. He has written about Einstein's reworking
of his famous formula e=mc2 into a popular parable. He has also written about
the physics of least action as an action rule in the world. He has written
about Engels' idea of a dialectic of nature. He has just completed a book
about natural language. Forthcoming from Stanford University Press in April
2002, it is called {Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Language.} (See
description below.) Although he has been an active member of the Sierra Club
off and on for 30 years, he has only recently begun to teach courses in literature
and the environment. He is presently studying the histories of natural language,
natural law, and natural contracts in the context of changing definitions
of frontier, wilderness and Spaceship Earth.
Forthcoming:
Publications
Stanford
University Press Description:
Wave Forms
A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Language
James H. Bunn
In this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be
understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase
“natural syntax,” he means that physical nature enters human communication
literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency.
This premise addresses a central question about symbolism in this century: How
are our ideas symbolically related to physical reality? The author outlines a
theory of communication in which nature is not reached by reference to an
object; rather, nature is part of the message known only tacitly as the wavy
carrier of a sign or signal. One doesn’t refer to nature, even though
one might be aiming to; one refers with nature as carrier vehicle.
The author demonstrates that a natural language of transmission has an inherent
physical syntax of patterned wave forms, which can also be described as certain
“laws of form”—a phrase used by D’Arcy Thompson, L. L. Whyte, Noam
Chomsky, and Stephen Jay Gould. He describes a syntax inherent in natural
languages that derives from the rhythmic form of a propelling wave. Instead of
the “laws” of a wave’s form, however, the author speaks of its elements of
rhythmic composition, because “rythmos” means “wave” in Greek and
because “composition” describes the creative process across the arts. In
pursuing a philosophy of rhythmic composition, the author draws on cognitive
science and semiotics. But he chiefly employs symmetry theory to describe the
forms of art, and especially the patterns of poetry, as structures built upon
the natural syntax of wave forms. Natural syntax, it turns out, follows a
fascinating group of symmetry transformations that derive from wave forms.
