Through interviews and analysis, Janice Winchester Nadeau takes a look at the dynamics at work in families in which a member has died. She shares stories which show how families gradually come to terms with their grief, and make sense of the death.

Scarlett Baron explores the works of two of the most admired and mythologized masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose: Gustave Flaubert (1822-1880) and James Joyce (1882-1941). She uncovers the lifelong fascination that Joyce harboured for Flaubert and investigates how this heightened interest inflected his own creative practice.

The spelling of the title is not a mistake. Dance through Religion for the Hell of It; The Physics of Synchronicity; James Joyce and Finnegan's Wake; The Godfather and the Goddess; The Poet as Early Warning Radar; Mammary Metaphysics; The Married Catholic Priests Convention; and much, much more...

Beyond the Word provides as implicit critique of postmodernism, redefining it as a further, radical stage of modernism. Theall argues that Joyce anticipated many of the insights of semiotics, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Moreover, Joyce and other modern artists differed from their predecessors in exhibiting a greater sense of their place within a dynamic, multifaceted field of communication. Thus, long before the emergence of postmodernism, these radical modernists posed an implicit challenge to the traditional notion of art as a privileged sphere. Beyond the Word situates artistic expression within a broad ecology of communication alongside genres such as comics, games, ads, videos, and slogans of spontaneous protest. Within this context, Theall reconsiders the contributions of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Gregory Bateson, and Kenneth Burke to our contemporary understanding of communication, and looks at artists as disparate as Dusan Makavejev, Stanley Kubrick, Alexander Pope, Rabelais, William Gibson, Gene Roddenberry, and Wyndham Lewis.

The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce’s works. With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore such problems as the difficulties these books pose to categories and summaries and our understanding of Joyce’s composition methods. The book explores Joyce’s ambiguities around death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce’s works. The book concludes with an examination of the tricky problem: what makes an interpretation untenable, and why do Joyce’s works inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings?

Papers for each conference issued in several volumes. Volumes distributed to conference registrants have title "Conference papers"; other volumes of papers published after the conference are identified as "Late papers", "Invited papers", or other similar titles. Most conferences also have a general index volume.

Entropic comedy is the phrase coined by Patrick O'Neill in this study to identify a particular mode of twentieth-century narrative that is not generally recognized. He describes it as the narrative expression of forms of decentred humour, or what might more loosely be called 'black humour.' O'Neill begins his investigation by examining the rise of an essentially new form of humour over the last three hundred years or so in the context of a rapid decay of confidence in traditional authoritative value systems. O'Neill analyses the resulting reorganization of the spectrum of humour, and examines th implications of this for the ways in which we read texts and the world we live in. He then turns from intellectual history to narratology and considers the relationship, in theoretical terms, of homour, play, and narrative as systems of discourse and the role of the reader as a textualizing agent. Finally, he considers some dozen twentieth-century narratives in French, German, and English (with occasional reference to other literatures) in the context of those historical and theoretical concerns. Authors of the texts analysed include Céline, Camus, Satre, and Robbe-Grillet in French; Heller, Beckett, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Joyce in English; Grass, Kafka, and Handke in German. The analyses proceed along lines suggested by structuralist, semiotic, and post-structuraist narrative and literary theory. From his analyses of these works O'Neill concludes they illustrate in narrative terms a mode of modern writing definable as entropic comedy, and he develops a taxonomy of the mode.