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ELT 42 : 1 1999 theorized as operating through parallel distributed processing, through a group of simultaneously operating systems that produces nonlinear behavior that cannot be attributed to any one element of those systems. Then he moves through the role of the "evolutionary model" in the contemporary sciences of complexity, especially in models of consciousness. In linking these ideas with the "networking strategies" of the Wake, I believe Rice suggests a model that is not so different from that of critics who have discussed the book through Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the "rhizome." Joyce, Chaos and Complexity offers an intellectual feast, especially for readers with an interest in both Joyce and in contemporary science. It is heady stuff, though readers who come to the book in search of a guide to the specifics of Joyce's works or even to his scientific and mathematical references will be disappointed. My main reservation about the book is that, while I enjoyed its lucidity and forcefulness, I didn't find Rice's arguments about contemporary criticism all that compelling: I have relatively little interest in the Derridean project, but find a great deal of contemporary poststructuralist criticism highly useful and entirely responsible, for all its specialized language. And perhaps those of us who love Joyce's work will always find in him what we see as the truth about our world. R. B. Kershner University of Florida The Political Joyce Trevor L. Williams. Reading Joyce Politically. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. xv + 229 pp. $49.95 TREVOR L. WILLIAMS'S Reading Joyce Politically is doubtless a Marxist production, since its author, who is nothing if not sincere, frequently identifies it as such, but Marxist in what Leopold Bloom calls "the widest possible sense." It is not so much a theory book as an attitude book. Williams gives his attitudes towards Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Gulf War, The Falklands War, Catholicism and Protestantism , the fall and execution of Nicolae Ceaucescu, advertising, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy , the Maastricht Treaty, America, the Cold War and why the west won it, Hong Kong, violence against women, the pope and liberation theology, Nicaragua and America's support of the Contras, Canadian-unity referenda , various issues of Irish politics, life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, 110 BOOK REVIEWS feminism, welfare legislation, the rise of multinational corporations and the culpability of North American companies who relocate plants in third-world locales, television preachers, Freud, Vanna White, industrial robots, "the young people of today's ecological movement"— and more. Some of the time this is refreshing: one is not used to encountering Vanna White in the pages of Joyce criticism. But it would be more refreshing still if the author would just once say something about any of these subjects other than what anyone who has spent time in faculty lounges over the last ten years could have predicted he would say. (He thinks Ms. White is paid too much for doing very little. Stop the presses. He is, by gum, all in favor of those fine young people and their ecological movement. Gosh.) If this is Marxism it is fortune-cookie Marxism, certainly an improvement over the other varieties, given their calamitous track record, but not easily distinguished from most of what, say, Kevin Costner probably believes. Marxist-Leninist rigor having made the gulag, rigor is not what you will find here. Williams's favorite phrase, "false consciousness"—he must use it fifty times—owes at least as much to the consciousness levels enumerated in Charles Reich's 60s feel-good best-seller The Greening of America, and to the derivative consciousness-raising sessions of the 70s, as it does to classical Marxist analysis. False consciousness in this book is essentially a belief in anything that Trevor Williams and his friends do not also believe in, and that is what it is, and that is all it is. His doctrinal fuzziness does have its advantages. There is mercifully little of the expected flatiron prose in the writing, which indeed sometimes errs on the side of chattiness. And it does seem to produce an openness to different varieties of (Marxist) thought which...

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