Joyce S Uncertainty Principle

Phillip Herring distinguishes the solvable problems from the truly insolvable mysteries in Joyce studies. His unusual and often witty book contains enough background material to appeal to a beginning reader of Joyce, yet it will be of the utmost importance to the specialist. He argues that Joyce formulated an uncertainty principle as early as the first Dubliners story and that he continued to engineer impossible-to-resolve mysteries" through his creation of literature's most radical experiment, Einnegans Wake. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

James Joyce's aesthetic theories, as explicated by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, have generally been assumed to be grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas. Indeed, Stephen mentions those thinkers especially in Portrait, at the same time as he rejects Romantic notions. This book investigates the extent to which Joyce's theories as well as his practice, beginning with his critical writings and Stephen Hero, are indebted to early German Romanticism. The allusions, affinities, and analogies, as well as differential relationships between the Joycean oeuvre and texts of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiegel, and Novalis are often palpable, sometimes tentative, but clearly present in most of his works, including Finnegans Wake.

In a paradigm shift away from classical understandings of geometry, nineteenth-century mathematicians developed new systems that featured surprising concepts such as the idea that parallel lines can curve and intersect. Providing evidence to confirm much that has largely been speculation, Joyce and Geometry reveals the full extent to which the modernist writer James Joyce was influenced by the radical theories of non-Euclidean geometry. Through close readings of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Joyce’s notebooks, Ciaran McMorran demonstrates that Joyce’s experiments with nonlinearity stem from a fascination with these new mathematical concepts. He highlights the maze-like patterns traced by Joyce’s characters as they wander Dublin’s streets; he explores recurring motifs such as the topography of the Earth’s curved surface and time as the fourth dimension of space; and he investigates in detail the enormous influence of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré, and other writers who were critical of the Euclidean tradition. Arguing that Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works encapsulates a modern crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation, McMorran delves into a major theme in Joyce’s work that has not been fully explored until now. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

James Joyce and After: Writer and Time is a volume of essays examining various aspects of time in literature, starting with the modernist revolution in fictional time initiated, among others, by Joyce, up until the present. In Part One: “James Joyce and Commodius Vicus of Recirculation,” the largest group of essays offers new and insightful readings of Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, Dubliners and Pomes Penyeach, reflecting a variety of Joyce’s experiments with time as well as demonstrating patterns and cross-references in his lifelong artistic explorations. Part Two: “Writer and Private Time,” focuses on selected literary responses to subjective experience of time. The articles analyse Joyce’s epiphanies, Elizabeth Bishop’s rendition of a lyrical moment in her poetry, as well as the interplay of fiction and autobiography in the writings of Joseph Conrad and J. M. Coetzee. Another article in this section uses the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to emphasise simultaneity of reading and writing in the newly defined genre of liberature. At the other end of the (temporal) spectrum, the articles in Part Three: “Writer and Public Time,” devoted to recent fiction, testify to the constant need for seeking new ways of recording the temporal dimension of collective experience. It is argued that the engagement with Victorianism in contemporary fiction has resulted in a special treatment of time involving duality of temporal levels, while the emerging post-9/11 genre takes account of the new audiovisual media in order to respond to one of the most traumatic experiences in contemporary history.

In Joyces Mistakes, Tim Conley explores the question of what constitutes an 'error' in a work of art. Using the works of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as central exploratory fields, Conley argues that an 'aesthetic of error' permeates Joyce's literary productions.

Analyzing works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, the author offers a new approach to narrative theory by showing how successive generations of novelists have used ever more powerful concepts of chance even though, he argues, chance is precisely what narrative cannot represent, since when it tries to do so it slips into the fated. He also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative. The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form?

James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers an alternative look at Joyce's writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce's experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations; the role of Dante's literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake; and the place of gender in Joyce's modernism. Two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce's cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume comprehensively examines the critical diversity of Joyce's linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and modernism.