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.

Marshall McLuhan was a satirist and prophetic poet who explored subjects from the occult and the esoteric to everyday popular culture and the emerging digital revolution. Written in an accessible, engaging manner, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan sheds new light on McLuhan's goals and the background to his influential writings.

Since its publication, Complex Adaptive Leadership has become a Gower bestseller that has been taught in corporate leadership programmes, business schools and universities around the world to high acclaim. In this updated paperback edition, Nick Obolensky argues that leadership should not be something only exercised by nominated leaders. It is a complex dynamic process involving all those engaged in a particular enterprise. The theoretical background to this lies in complexity science and chaos theory - spoken and written about in the context of leadership for the last 20 years, but still little understood. We all seem intuitively to know leadership 'isn't what it used to be' but we still cling to old assumptions which look anachronistic in changing and challenging times. Nick Obolensky has practised, researched and taught leadership in the public, private and voluntary sectors. In this exciting book he brings together his knowledge of theory, his own experience, and the results of 19 years of research involving 2,500 executives in 40 countries around the world. The main conclusion from that research is that the more complex things become, the less traditional directive leadership is needed. Those operating in the real world, nonetheless, need ways of coping. The book is focused on helping practitioners struggling to interpret and react to increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) times. The book will particularly appeal to practitioners wishing to improve their leadership effectiveness as well as for students and researchers in the field of leadership.

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies. Cognitive Joyce presents Joyce's relationship to the scientific knowledge and practices of his time and examines his texts in light of contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-sciences. The chapters pursue a threefold investigation—into the author's "extended mind" at work, into his characters' complex and at times pathological perceptive and mental processes, and into the elaborate responses the work elicits as we perform the act of reading. This volume not only offers comprehensive overviews of the oeuvre, but also detailed close-readings that unveil the linguistic focus of Joyce's drama of cognition.

The first volume to collect essays from the emergent field of cultural studies that specifically address the work of James Joyce, Cultural Studies of James Joyce includes work from both well-established Joyce scholars such as Margot Norris and Cheryl Herr and by such younger writers as Tracey Teets Schwarze and Paul Saint-Amour. Topics range over the whole field of culture, from “Nipper” the Victrola dog to the statuary of Praxitiles, from the Tank Girl comics to studies of Irish schizophrenia, from the history of University College Dublin to the political ferment over choral singing at the turn of the century. The volume should be of interest to Joyceans, to students of literature and culture in the twentieth century, and especially to those interested in the interactions of different cultural levels between the nineteenth century and our own time. An introductory survey by R. Brandon Kershner discusses the rise of cultural studies and places the issue within modern debates in literary theory.

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.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms proceduralists), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls disruptors). Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of orderly disorder, Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literar

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’s work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing this paradigm shift, current and future scholars can open themselves up to the possibility of seeing that movement, maybe even noticing it for the first time, can yield surprisingly fresh twenty-first-century readings.