Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

This chapter focuses on James Joyce’s investments in life at the microscopic level in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a way of linking literature and science methodology with Grusin’s (2015) concept of a “nonhuman turn.” Ebury’s intervention is to turn an established critical conversation about Joyce’s knowledge of the nature of matter towards his aesthetic and ethical emphasis on nonhuman life, and consider how his interests in science facilitate an awareness of connectedness across different categories of being. Previous ecocritical scholarship on Joyce has mostly concerned itself with whole entities, from Joyce’s representation of rivers or trees to Joyce’s attitudes to specific species and biological principles. Ebury builds on Tim Clark’s (2015) “scale framing” approach to argue that Joyce’s use of the nonhuman microscopic scale, informed by the complexities of quantum physics, might help us to cope with the difficult equation of our responsibility to the nonhuman.

Ulysses’ mad pursuit of virtue and knowledge presumed that an exploration of physical facts can yield an understanding of value. In the examination on love in the heaven of the fixed stars, St. John first asks not what love is, but where Dante’s soul is pointed. To love is to have an aim, a point, a target. It is to value something more than other things and, in the hierarchy of all good things, there must be one that is the best of all. It is from the sphere of the constellations, of which Ulysses necessarily lost sight when he ventured beyond the known world into the southern hemisphere, that Adam reveals that the cause of his long exile was a trespassing beyond the sign. Since language, the logos, is what humans use to discern what is good and what is harmful, it enacts the role of the God of Bible who promised to reveal to Moses “every value.

The 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses makes questions of personal and national literary rivalry its topic. Stephen Dedalus’s wrestling with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in front of a skeptical audience in the National Library acts out the dramas of mimetic rivalry and anxiety of influence that are the chapter’s theme. Here, Joyce reflects on the nature of literary production and on national and international literary competition and consecration. The episode compresses a compendium of irreverent earlier Irish readings of Shakespeare into Stephen’s performance and transacts Joyce’s ongoing rivalry with his own Irish contemporaries, this articulated in a ghostly or doubled timeframe that counterpoints the 1904 Dublin of the novel’s setting to the 1922 Paris of Ulysses’ eventual triumphant publication. 'Scylla and Charybdis' satirizes the liberal humanist sentimentalism of the Goethean concept of weltliteratur. Weltliteratur, in Ulysses, consecrates the texts it elevates into a cosmopolitan supranational system that claims to be neutrally above the national field and its melancholy petty obsessions; nevertheless, national rivalries are essential to world literary systems and even when, maybe especially when, they are elevated to 'world classics' canonical texts are made to serve some political purpose.

One of the most plausible scenarios for how newer technologies might disrupt and reconstitute the Internet economy is based on blockchain and related mechanisms. Because of their fundamental decentralization, enforced through cryptography, these technologies hold out the promise of resisting the centralization of control by dominant digital platforms. The problem is that the power of blockchain to create trust without reliance on trusted third parties depends on immutable transactions. And that means prospectively limiting human freedom of action. Replacing human judgment with relentlessly logical machines operating self-enforcing “smart contracts” has already produced several spectacular failures. Immutability inevitably creates the possibility of catastrophe, unless paired with governance mechanisms that keep humans in the loop. The best possible approach is governance by design, incorporating layers of coordinated decision-making throughout the design of blockchain networks and applications.

The chapter finds in Ulysses the logical end to Loyola’s project. It is Joyce’s most radical experiment thus far in creating his own ‘exercise’, his own set of impossible demands on the reader. It closely reads a particularly overloaded passage from the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, a particular structure of paranoid frustration that Joyce has worked on before but one that here entails a most unstable position from the reader in the quest for that ‘sincere irony’ Loyola and Joyce demand.