Joyce, Chaos and Complexity

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.

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