Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity

Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity

Author: Thomas Jackson Rice

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780252065835

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Thomas Rice compellingly argues that James Joyce's work resists postmodernist approaches of ambiguity: Joyce never abandoned his conviction that reality exists, regardless of the human ability to represent it. Placing Joyce in his cultural context, Rice first traces the influence of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He then demonstrates that, when later innovations in science transformed entire worldviews, Joyce recognized conventional literary modes of representation as offering only arbitrary constructions of this reality. Joyce responded in Ulysses by experimenting with perspective, embedding design, and affirming the existence of reality. Rice contends that Ulysses presages the multiple tensions of chaos theory; likewise, chaos theory can serve as a model for understanding Ulysses. In Finnegans Wake Joyce consummates his vision and anticipates the theories of complexity science through a dynamic approximation of reality.


Chaos Theory and James Joyce's Everyman

Chaos Theory and James Joyce's Everyman

Author: Peter Francis Mackey

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780813017082

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This study examines how Leopold Bloom's behaviour relates to such human matters as fate, free will, chance and courage. Unravelling some of Ulysses' most challenging passages, it reveals the heroism of the novel's main character while also demonstrating the utility of chaos theory for literary analysis. In a detailed assessments of Bloom's thoughts, behaviour and character, the author examines the philosophy of life apparent in Bloom's persistence amidst the day's - and the novel's - dramatic shifts. He demonstrates specific ways in which the stream-of-consciousness technique conveys personality, how Bloom's contingent relationship with his world reveals his fears and hopes, and how he finally pursues his desires despite the sad life that fate seems to have prepared for him.


The Most Dangerous Book

The Most Dangerous Book

Author: Kevin Birmingham

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0143127543

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Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.


Irish Divorce / Joyce's Ulysses

Irish Divorce / Joyce's Ulysses

Author: Peter Kuch

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1137571861

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This engrossing, ground-breaking book challenges the long-held conviction that prior to the second divorce referendum of 1995 Irish people could not obtain a divorce that gave them the right to remarry. Joyce knew otherwise, as Peter Kuch reveals—obtaining a decree absolute in Edwardian Ireland, rather than separation from bed and board, was possible. Bloom’s “Divorce, not now” and Molly’s “suppose I divorced him”—whether whim, wish, fantasy, or conviction—reflects an Irish practice of petitioning the English court, a ruse that, even though it was known to lawyers, judges, and politicians at the time, has long been forgotten. By drawing attention to divorce as one response to adultery, Joyce created a domestic and legal space in which to interrogate the sometimes rival and sometimes collusive Imperial and Ecclesiastical hegemonies that sought to control the Irish mind. This compelling, original book provides a refreshingly new frame for enjoying Ulysses even as it prompts the general reader to think about relationships and about the politics of concealment that operate in forging national identity


Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture

Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture

Author: Philip Sicker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1108671748

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Although Joyce was losing his sight when he wrote Ulysses, Stephen's and Bloom's visual experiences are extraordinarily rich and complex. Absorbing the influences of popular visual attractions such as dioramas, stereoscopes and mutoscopes, their perceptions of Dublin are shaped by what Walter Benjamin calls 'unconscious optics'. Analyzing closely the texture of their impressions and of Joyce's prismatic narrative styles, Philip Sicker explores the phenomenon of sight from a wide-ranging set of perspectives: eighteenth-century epistemology (Locke and Berkeley), theories of the flaneur (Baudelaire and Benjamin), Italian Futurist art (Marinetti and Boccioni), photography (Barthes and Sontag), and the silent films Joyce watched in Dublin and Trieste. The concept of 'spectacle' as a mechanically-constructed visual experience informs Sicker's examination of mediated perception and emerges as a hallmark of modernist culture itself. This study is an important contribution to the growing interest in how deeply the philosophy and science of visual perception influenced modernism.


The Hidden History of Coined Words

The Hidden History of Coined Words

Author: Ralph Keyes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0190466766

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"How do words get coined? That question is explored in Ralph Keyes's latest book, The Hidden History of Coined Words. Based on meticulous research, Keyes has determined that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by intention. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, he's discovered, to taunt, even to prank. Knickers resulted from a hoax, big bang from an insult. Wisecracking produced software, crowdsource, and blog. More than a few neologisms weren't even coined intentionally: they resulted from happy accidents such as typos, mistranslations, and misheard words like bigly and buttonhole, or from an unintended coinage such as Isaac Asimov's robotics. Many of the word coiners Keyes writes about come from unlikely quarters. Neologizers (a Thomas Jefferson coinage) include not just learned scholars and literary lions but cartoonists, columnists, children's authors, and children as well. Wimp, Keyes tells us, originated with an early 20th century book series on The Wymps, goop from a series about The Goops, and nerd from a book by Dr. Seuss. Competing claims to have coined terms like gonzo, mojo, and booty call are assessed, as is epic battles fought between new word partisans, and those who think we have enough words already. A concluding chapter offers pointers on how to coin a word of one's own. Written in a reader-friendly manner, The Hidden History of Coined Words will appeal not just to word lovers but history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone at all who is interested in a well-informed good read"--


The River Capture

The River Capture

Author: Mary Costello

Publisher: Canongate Books

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1782116443

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'Exceptional' The Times 'Luminous . . . Unexpected' Guardian Shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Literary Awards and the Kerry Group Awards Luke O’Brien has left Dublin to live a quiet life on the bend of the River Sullane. Alone in his big house, he longs for a return to his family’s heyday and turns to books for solace. One morning a young woman arrives at his door, presenting Luke and his family with an almost impossible dilemma.