In this chapter, the authors discuss the challenges of using phenomenology as a research design, where the researcher is also a participant or has similar characteristics as the subjects of the research. This calls for the researcher to become a researcher-participant, which comes with its own challenges, including maintaining unbiased interconnection between the authors as researchers and as the object of research (researcher-participants), and still being able to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States. Research data is great, but stories from and by engaged respondents living the phenomena being investigated are more inspiring and actionable. Involved knowing and lived experiences, combined with rigorous research methodology, is in itself a researcher's challenge.

The authors were in every step of the research cognizant of the fact that personal knowing rather than objective, methodological knowledge was crucial to the authenticity of the results because of being directly and personally involved in what we know by lived experiences about the phenomenon. This personal dimension of knowing through experience is an advantage in that it opens up and expands the phenomena that is being studied and also in the course of interpreting it.

We chose to use qualitative inquiry as our guiding methodological approach because it involves “the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials […] that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in people's lives” (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 2) as well as “the nature and meaning of things, a phenomenon's essence and essentials that determine what it is” (Saldana 2011, 7). Qualitative inquiry allowed us to examine the meaning-making process and the resulting meaning made by sub-Saharan African immigrants about their lived experiences as they made decisions to emigrate. Further, it allowed us to explore their experiences as they navigated their new environment in the places they choose to settle once in the United States and the impact it had on their lives (Van Manen 1990; Moustakas 1994; Hein and Austin 2001; Giorgio 2009). The phenomenon that our research explores is the stories of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States.

Where Chapter 1 showed us that coastal erosion scours the shoreline and gives rise to tales of nocturnal predators who come from the sea and threaten us or our loved ones, further along the coastline that eroded material is re-deposited in bays, estuaries and inlets, or forms marine features such as spits, sandbanks and saltmarshes. This chapter is sub-divided into three sections, each of which takes as its focus a different aspect of subterranean instability, leading to death or untimely burial. In the first section, wetland topography caused by marine deposition takes the form of coastal saltmarsh, especially in landscapes in which that marshland is also combined with fluvial (rainwater) flooding. The result is a swampy and endlessly shifting mix of freshwater and saltwater channels, complicated by tidal ebb and flow. Writers setting their haunted tales in such terrain exploit the fact that, underlying this deadly marsh lie human secrets long buried, but rising to the surface as the narrative unfolds, aided by recurrent and flooding rain. Here, the distinction between local walker and incoming traveller becomes especially acute, because only those who are native to the saltmarsh know how precariously footfall can imprint itself safely across its surface. Always, it is the incoming traveller who gives rise to the Gothic impetus for these narratives.

In the second part of the chapter we move on to upland burial sites, which might (as in the Languedoc region of South-West France explored by Kate Mosse), have once been seabed, but now form mountainous topography full of caves and other natural and unnatural hiding places. In these landscapes sedimentation, or a multiple layering and over-layering across decades, centuries and eras proves the persistent geological process, one which finds a metaphorical companion in storytelling across the centuries, as one tale overwrites and gives rise to another over time, shape-shifting in the retelling while continuing to connect generations. In several of these narratives, reading equates to the armchair traveller reaching down through the strata to access a journey through time: thus are bodies uncovered, secrets unearthed and historic trauma resolved. For the protagonists themselves, these upland narratives emphasise the challenge the journeys themselves comprise, either due to the mountainous terrain, or the significance of the quest which impels the protagonists forward. Here, the impetus frames itself as a challenge from beyond the grave.

The roots of early elemental Gothic reside in a form of meteorological ‘shock and awe’, usually conveyed by thunder and lightning. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) associates elemental weather directly with the creation of monstrosity and extends into icy geographical terrain as a means of bringing to the fore other related extremes: of scale, of fear and of the unknown. That combination of ingredients, forged by Shelley and discussed by us in the Introduction, feeds right through the subsequent history of elemental Gothic and is discussed in this chapter also in relation to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), M.R. James’ ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904) and ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925), John W. Campbell's ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938), Robert Aickman's ‘Ringing the Changes’ (1964), Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1983) and Michelle Paver's Dark Matter (2010). As with all four main chapters of this book, we establish a geographical framework for our readings of these literary texts and, in this chapter, the landscape focus is on water (primarily frozen and coastal) and its interface with the geological, elemental and climatological features of the land which meets it. All the texts discussed in this chapter are centred upon very precise topographical features and it is our contention that the haunted nature of the landscapes created therein derives equally precisely from the interface between the human presence, as it travels across its surface, and the frictional trace of human footfall in often conflictual relationship with that terrain. The chapter is subdivided into two sections, ‘The Polar Uncanny’ and ‘Creeping Coastlines’ and begins by extending the discussion of Frankenstein embarked on in the Introduction, now placing Victor Frankenstein's struggle at the heart of an elemental maelstrom.

In 1757, Edmund Burke identified the sublime as that which emanates from ‘Greatness of dimension … Extension … in length, height, or depth’, thus to provoke fear and awe in the beholder (Burke, 1990: 66). Sixty years later, the topographical backdrop Shelley depicts, as Frankenstein engages in a similarly expansive search for his monster towards the end of the novel, could be argued to offer an exemplary literary illustration of the Burkean sublime: ‘I continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean appeared at a distance and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon…Covered with ice, it was only to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness’ (Shelley, 1985: 249). Throughout Frankenstein, Victor's actions play out against a sustained and often ferocious elemental backdrop, suggestive of a kind of divine disquiet at the scientist's sacrilegious ambitions. Gillen D’Arcy Wood reminds us that the summer of 1816, the year when Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and Percy Bysshe Shelley undertook their now famous trip to Geneva, where and when Frankenstein was conceived, came to be known as the ‘Year without a Summer’, due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies the previous year. In April 1815, what is now known as ‘the greatest eruption in Earth's recorded history,’ caused a ‘stratospheric ash cloud’ to move across the earth, resulting in ‘a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes’ (D’Arcy Wood, 2020: 691–92). As a result, Shelley's trip to the Alps in 1816 was cloaked in persistent rain and violent storms, an elemental orchestration that makes its effect felt closely in the fictional landscape of Frankenstein.

Victor, returning to his parental home, following the tragic news of his young brother's murder at the monster's hands, arrives late, only to find the city gates closed. Thus is he

Reflections on the unity of knowledge were widely expressed at different times in history. They started with the philosophers of antiquity, and then continued in the Middle Ages, during the Enlightenment, in the theoretical foundations of the mereology of systemic thought and also throughout the philosophy of science. Debate on the theme was intensified in the sixteenth century and later with the revolutionary ideas of German, French, English and Italian thinkers about knowledge and the scientific method that will give rise to modern science; for example, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Gottfried W. Leibniz, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Table 1.1 shows how the ideas of such thinkers intersect throughout time.

In the wake of modern science, however, the issue of disciplinary specialization has emerged, causing a profound change in the search for scientific knowledge. The new order of increasingly specialized disciplines negatively affected the integrated view of science and knowledge, as it kept a distance from the various realities found in the same problem or circumstance and even disregarding the necessary integration between different types of knowledge. Upon realization of this trend, numerous movements and initiatives emerged out of the concern for the breakdown of the unity of knowledge. The Enlightenment philosophers, for example, organized the Encyclopédie or Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Diderot and D’Alembert 1751–1772; Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts), a collection of 17 volumes, released between 1751 and 1772 in order to gather, organize and disseminate the knowledge available. Despite this grand undertaking, science has been fragmented, and this situation remains until today.

In the 1990s, however, the debate on the importance of pursuing the unity of knowledge was rekindled, enhanced by the concept of transdisciplinarity, introduced in the 1970s. It was argued that the traditional mode of knowledge production (Mode 1) gave way to a new way (Mode 2) that was more suited to capturing the complexity of reality through scientific research.

The “Messianic scene” of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses both critiques and parodies religious and political spectacles in Ireland deriving from the urban festivals and processions that flourished throughout monarchical and imperial Europe. The torchlight procession and Bloom's investiture as “undoubted emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm,” Leopold the First (U 15.1471–73), are in apostolic succession to these urban spectacles of pomp and circumstance staged to legitimize the power of political rule. This Circean burlesque re-inscribes the streets of subaltern Dublin and thereby also recalls the resistance to imperial politics and the reclamation of public space enacted by nationalist counterspectacles, questioning their own claim to historical truth and exploring the power relations that undergird the dialectic of history and memory. Such a re-inscription critiques both utopian and dystopian sociopolitical visions of colonial Ireland. In staging a performative resistance to structures of power, this re-inscription posits and yet also critiques the subversive, even revolutionary, function of an avant-garde or modernist experimental art in a colonial state; and it questions the possibility for such an art to launch a system-immanent critique of itself under subaltern conditions. Margot Norris notes that historically Joyce is situated “at the precise moment when the avant-garde's self-critique was made possible by its confrontation with aestheticism's disavowal of art's social origin.” As such, Joyce's own avantgardism is located in “a dramatic and dynamic textual performativity whose end is not autotelic […] but political.” The Joycean text is “the staging of a cultural phenomenon,” she argues: “as an artist of (and, as Irishman, prostituted to) the dominant culture,” his art is “literally inscribed in the textualization of Ireland's political and economic life.” In demonstrating “art's resistance to, and suppression by, civic and commercial systems responsive to a hegemonic order,” Joyce thereby recovers its “implied violence.”

Throughout Europe, how religious, funereal and, especially, political processions moved circuitously through the streets of a city, and how a city served as stage set for these theatrical ceremonies, demonstrated how urban space could serve as vehicle for messages of power.

I would like to start by clarifying something about the nature of freedom, as Joyce was fighting for it. Joyce's main concern was not with freeing Ireland from British control, but with freeing the mind. As a writer, his technique for doing so was to challenge the (learned, socially conditioned) assumptions of his readers. As Stephen says in “Circe,” pointing to his forehead, “In here it is I must kill the priest and the king.” And in his early essay “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce makes a related point about Catholicism, which enslaves the soul: “I do not see what good it does to fulminate against English tyranny while the tyranny of Rome still holds the dwelling place of the soul.” In 1967 in the U.S., Martin Luther King said something very similar: “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.” In Portrait, the prequel to Ulysses, Stephen wonders in his youthfully superior idiom about freeing the minds and touching the conscience of “the patricians of Ireland” sitting in Maple's Hotel, along with their daughters: “How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own?”4 Stephen again expresses his determination to create a conscience for his compatriots at the end of the novel, when he vows to “encounter the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (P 213).

In Portrait, Stephen is angry, seeing his contemporaries as ignoble and without a conscience. In Ulysses, though, haunted by the pathos of his mother's death and humbled by the pricks of his own conscience as he recalls his treatment of her, Stephen is trembling on the brink of greater selfawareness and concern for the other: “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart” (U 1.102). He does not yet know how to do what Leopold Bloom can do so admirably, or what Joyce positions the reader to do over and over in Ulysses: to look again, not only at the other but also at himself.

Benchmarks

The Disciplinary Relations of Jean Piaget and Andre Lichnerowicz in the 1970s

The contribution of Jean Piaget and André Lichnerowicz to transdisciplinarity began with the 1970 event and extended for some time until each one of them embraced their main areas of interest, for which they became known. Biologist Piaget dedicated his whole life to studying the process of knowledge acquisition, especially by children. Lichnerowicz was dedicated to the study of differential geometry and was recognized for his contribution in the field, for example, he chaired the Lichnerowicz Commission, established to analyse the pedagogical project of teaching mathematics.

In the early 1970s, they were both involved in teaching and learning issues of science, and Piaget, in particular, was aware of initiatives in the scientific community for the debate on disciplinarity, including the Unity of Science movement from the first half of the twentieth century (1922–1936), founded by a group of scientists and philosophers who met regularly at the University of Vienna (hence it was called the Vienna Circle, also known as the ‘Ernst Mach Society’). The movement argued that there should be a unitary set of physical premises from which the regularities of all reality could be derived.

During the 1970 event, this vision was contained in the reflections of his work ‘L’épistémologie des relations interdisciplinaires’, as well as in the necessary distinctions between interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the results of which led him, in fact, to coin the term and the first concept of transdisciplinarity:

Throughout the Conference, it is evident that the educator saw transdisciplinarity as a new form of disciplinary relations, more integrative than interdisciplinarity, going beyond and even being the result of interdisciplinarity. Nicolescu (2006) pointed out that ‘this description is vague, but has the merit of pointing to a new space of knowledge “without stable boundaries between the disciplines” ‘ (p. 1).

The Integrative Approach

Integration is central to all phases of transdisciplinary research, from problem identification and structuring to implementation. Pohl et al. (2018) argued that integration is not a value in itself, but a necessary methodology to meet society's demands for knowledge. Some authors, such as Bergmann et al. (2012), classified interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research as integrative research, based on the degree of interaction between academic and non-academic participants. A specific feature of this classification is precisely the fact that it acknowledges the involvement of interested parties in integrative approaches, and this characteristic also poses the greatest challenge.

Disciplinary interactions, which evolve into interdisciplinary research, refer, in this continuum, to the degree of cooperation and integration of the various disciplines for resolution of the research problem. When the involvement of non-academic actors is added to this scenario, the continuum flows into transdisciplinary research (Tress et al. 2005). It is a trend that does not emphasize differentiation and specialization, but rather the need to unite various fields of knowledge and work experiences that can result in new specialties and types of socialization and, in the end, in more robust, resistant and healthier institutions.

Genuine transdisciplinary integrative research is concerned with coordinating different bodies of knowledge, after identifying gaps in the science, technology and society tripod, and understanding how to fill these gaps with appropriate scientific methodology and theoretical frameworks. It is the recognition that the bases of specialized knowledge are dispersed in the very heterogeneity of reality and that, therefore, only an integrative approach can possibly capture essential features of the context where the problem lies. It is about bringing to the scientific framework relevant social problems that need a solution and take science to the relevant problems that need a solution, wherever they are. It is about emphasizing the contextuality of transdisciplinary research, whose roots are founded on the needs of affected social actors, the inclusion of the participants involved and the commitment to mutual learning, and whose highest quality is ‘to have a practical effect on the world beyond science’ (p. 43).

This dedicated volume proposes to honor the rich, varied, trenchant, and tremendously influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in a series of essays amplifying her illumination of Joyce's literary oeuvre along with several prominent lines she introduced and investigated. Our title is intended to mark the common denominator running, like Ariadne's thread, throughout Professor Norris’ many-sided explorations of Joyce's labyrinth. For Professor Norris, the quiddity of Joyce's work, its elusive whatness, resides in its unfolding of multiple what elses, its opening up of alternative ways of regarding the novels themselves, the narrative or generic forms they destabilize, the world to which they refer, the heritages they tap, and above all the readers they address. These five categories, in fact—textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories, and variegated readerships—serve as anchoring points of the collection, each corresponding with one of the significant projects delineating Professor Norris’ esteemed career. Prominent Joycean, Modernist, and Irish studies scholars of different nations and generations supply the essays under each heading.

I

Among the many strengths of Margot Norris's extensive writing on Joyce is her concern for the reader's experience of the text. Whether peering through the surface textures of Dubliners to detect the subtle play of power and desire, imagining the first-time reader of Ulysses enjoying its surprises and tessellations, or drawing on recent theoretical movements to illuminate the workings of Finnegans Wake, her critical writing does ample justice to the unique way an encounter with the Joycean text challenges, puzzles, disconcerts, but always rewards. In this essay I will explore one aspect of Joyce's formal innovation, taking my cue from this characteristic of Margot Norris's writing by examining the contribution it makes to the reader's experience of Ulysses, and consider some writers who followed in Joyce's footsteps.

Of course, “the reader” is not an unproblematic concept. In the first instance, the reader is inevitably myself, but I will do my best to exclude what might be idiosyncratic about my responses. The value of a community of critical readers, such as Joyce is lucky to have, is that idiosyncrasies— as likely to be a feature of “veteran” as of “virgin” readings, to use Norris's terms—can be spotted and ironed out. “Experience,” too, is a complex term. It figures centrally in several philosophical schools, notably empiricism, with its assumption that knowledge derives from sensory experience, phenomenology, sometimes labelled the “philosophy of experience,” and existentialism, which emphasizes personal decisions. I propose to use the term in a fairly colloquial sense to refer to what happens, mentally, emotionally, and physically, in the process of literary reading. What I don't want to imply by using the term is that a theory of the literary work as experienced event is primarily an empirical—that is to say, a psychological or neurological— theory interested in what goes on in reader's brain (or, for that matter, a physiological theory interested in what goes on in the rest of the body), even though any conclusions that might be drawn about the reader's experience might be mappable onto these domains.

Literary form is usually discussed in terms of the dictum that form and meaning are inseparable, a dictum that goes back at least to the Romantics. The notion of “organic form,” introduced most influentially into English literary criticism by Coleridge (following A. W. Schlegel), continues to surface right up to the present.

In Chapter 4, the authors further discuss the issues of identity by exploring how sub-Saharan African immigrants perceive and define success. The major reason cited for immigrating was education, which was also perceived as a definition as well as a criterion of success.

Analogies have a way of expressing thoughts that the plain word cannot. The common analogy related to success in a hierarchical place like the United States is that of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” and having a strong work ethic. This is not only a contradiction in terms, as it is impossible to raise oneself by tugging on the loops of one's boots, but also a myth given the many systemic barriers that make it difficult for some groups to succeed, no matter how hard they work. The idiom incorrectly presupposes that we are all given the same chances on a level playing field and the environment is the same for all, that we all start at the same point, as in a race, and end at the same place called the “finishing line.” The huge responsibility placed on the individual and the multitudes of factors that the individual has no control over are totally disregarded. It is like expecting someone to pull themselves out of a six-foot hole without any assistance. If the person succeeds, there is usually no recognition and appreciation for managing such a feat, especially if they belong to any of the minoritized groups. At the same time, factors and privileges extended to some individuals in the dominant group that allow them to thrive are downplayed.

Conditions for human development may be explored from a psychological approach and might include dimensions such as physical, biological, and cultural, as well as individual and social potentials and the immediate and external environment and their influences. Gone are the days when nations used to be measured by gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product. These days even the bottom line has been replaced by the triple bottom line. Human development and well-being have been incorporated into the index of assessing a nation's success.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) understands human development as “expanding the richness of human life” (UNDP n.d.a.). The approach goes beyond simple measures of the richness of an economy. Instead, the UNDP's human development approach looks at people's lives, their opportunities to gain skills and use those skills, and to have choices in how they fulfill their potential.