ABSTRACT
Published in 1979 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is a difficult work to classify. Douglas Hofstadter's book is a better than 700-page attempt at connecting the work of three geniuses in three different fields, and also an elaborate and extended metaphor for the systems of the human mind and the scientific world's attempts at recreating those systems of structure through artificial intelligence research. Concrete or visual poetry sometimes attempts similar representations of multiple lines, and some printed libretti and dramatic texts also undertake this mode of contrapuntal writing, using spacing, punctuation, and changes in typeface to imply a simultaneity in contradiction to our typical mode(s) of reading. The chapter also looks at the musical work that Burgess' title points toward. The first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Kochel No. 550, published in 1788, could easily be called a textbook sonata-allegro form.
