Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity

Thomas Rice author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Illinois Press

Published:1st Jan '97

Should be back in stock very soon

Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity cover

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.
 

"This is the fullest, most articulate case I know of for Joyce's dialogue with the new sciences. It is well written, lucidly argued, and readable." -- Robert Spoo, editor, James Joyce Quarterly

ISBN: 9780252065835

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 313g

224 pages