Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (Music in American Life (Paperback)) - Softcover

Rice, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252065832 ISBN 13: 9780252065835

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Placing Joyce in his cultural context, Rice first provocatively traces the previously unacknowledged formative 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 merely arbitrary constructions of this new reality.

About the Author:

Thomas Jackson Rice is professor of English and director of Graduate Studies at the University of South Carolina.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0252065832
• ISBN 13: 9780252065835
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224