Joyce, chaos, and complexity
By: Thomas Jackson Rice.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
Subjects: Joyce, James, 1882-1941 -- Knowledge -- Science.; Literature and science -- Ireland -- History -- 20th century.; Mathematics and literature -- Ireland -- History -- 20th century.; Chaotic behavior in systems in literature.; Complexity (Philosophy) in literature.; Postmodernism (Literature) -- Ireland.; Science in literature.
Description: Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity studies the manifold relations among twentieth-century mathematics and Science, James Joyce's fiction, and the critical reception of Joyce's work. Calling for profound reassessments, Thomas Jackson Rice compellingly argues that 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 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.

Joyce responded to these developmeats in Ulysses by experimenting with perspective, embedding design, and affirming the existence of reality. Rice contends that Ulysses is a precursor to 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-196) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : James Joyce, from "scientific" realist to scientific "realist"; title: The elements of geometry in Dubliners; title: The aliments of jumeantry in A portrait of the artist as a young man; title: Ulysses, chaos, and complexity; title: Finnegans wake : the complexity of artificial life; title: Appendixes: A. Joyce, mathematics, and science. B. Modern physics.