[Knowles] willfully, unapologetically, ludically, and joyfully treats Ulysses as literature's greatest puzzle palace. It is the first full-scale book concerned not partially or incidentally but wholly, wholeheartedly, and sympathetically with the cache-cache games that Joyce unquestionably likes to play with his readers. Knowles brings a cryptographer's mind and a musician's ear to Joyce's musemathematical masterpiece, with results that are often illuminating and always stimulating."-- John Gordon, Connecticut College "[This book's] discoveries in music, mathematics, linguistics, and cultural studies are consonant with the best specialized studies I have read; yet it provides first-time readers with methods that will enrich their experience of Joyce."-- Michael J. O'Shea, Newberry College Embracing improbable and wildly anachronistic connections, Sebastian Knowles has devised a new approach to reading Ulysses, one that makes its author less of a modernist and more of a prophet of contemporary science, literature, and critical thought. The Dublin Helix is a puzzle book, taking as its method James Joyce's own playful manipulations of language and matching them with entertaining word searches, acrostics, and other enigmas. Knowles finds ways into Ulysses that have never before been imagined, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the structure for genetic material. Each chapter presents a puzzle, and each solution completes a little more of the picture of the vital language of the modern classic. By the end, the strange and wonderful text that is Joyce's Ulysses may be finally pieced together. Both entertainment and scholarship, the book presents Joyce scholars with much that is new, a great deal that is controversial, and an unusual willingness to allow for misreadings and bogus statements. With appendixes that will make inviting handouts (originally developed for Knowles's own students), the book also offers an excellent introduction to a Ulysses course. Sebastian D. G. Knowles, associate professor of English at Ohio State University, is the editor of Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, the coauthor of An Annotated Bibliography of a Decade of T. S. Eliot Criticism, and the author of A Purgatorial Flame, a study of the literature of World War II.
A close examination of the story "After the race," which originally appeared in Dubliners that argues that the story represents a microcosm of some of the issues most central to Joyce scholarship: evolution as an artist, the Catholic Church, and nostalgia for a rapidly changing Ireland.
At Fault is an exhilarating celebration of risk-taking in the work of James Joyce. Esteemed Joyce scholar and teacher Sebastian Knowles critiques the state of the modern American university, denouncing what he sees as an accelerating trend of corporatization that is repressing discussions of controversial ideas and texts in the classroom. Arguing that Joyce offers the antidote to risk-averse attitudes in higher education, he shows how the modernist writer models an openness to being "at fault" that should be central to the academic enterprise. Knowles describes Joyce's writing style as an "outlaw language" imbued with the possibility and acknowledgment of failure. He demonstrates that Joyce's texts and characters display a drive to explore the boundaries of experience, to move outward in a centrifugal pattern, to defy delimitation. Knowles further highlights the expansiveness of Joyce’s world by engaging a diverse range of topics, including Jumbo the elephant as a symbol of imperialism, the gramophone as a representation of the machine age, solfège and live music performance in the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, Joyce's jokes and the neurology of humor, and inventive ways of reading and teaching Finnegans Wake. Contending that error is the central theme in all of Joyce's work, Knowles argues that the freedom to challenge boundaries and make mistakes is essential to an effective learning environment. Energetic and delightfully erudite, and offering insights drawn from over thirty years of classroom experience, Knowles inspires readers with the infinite possibilities of free human thought exemplified by Joyce's writing. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles
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