Focusing on the most commonly studied texts, it guides the reader through Joyce's stylistic and thematic complexity and through differing theoretical interpretations of his work.

"In clear and simple prose, Mahon explains how to connect this little black box to the Joycean engine. Just pull some gears, it falls into place and works." -Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania James Joyce's work has been regarded as some of the most obscure, challenging, and difficult writing ever committed to paper; it is also shamelessly funny and endlessly entertaining. Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed celebrates the daring, humor and playfulness of Joyce's complex work while engaging with and elucidating the most demanding aspects of his writing. The book explores in detail the motifs and radical innovations of style and technique that characterize his major works-Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. By highlighting how Joyce's texts have been read by recent innovations in literary and cultural theory, Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed offers the reader a Joyce that is contemporary, fresh, and relevant.

Literature.

Marshall McLuhan was dubbed a media guru when he came to prominence in the 1960s. The Woodstock generation found him cool; their parents found him perplexing. By 1963, McLuhan was Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and would be a public intellectual on the international stage for more than a decade, then linked forever to his two best known coinages: the global village and the medium is the message. Taken as a whole, McLuhan's writings reveal a profound coherence and illuminate his unifying vision for the study of language, literature, and culture, grounded in the broad understanding of any medium or technology as an extension of the human body. McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed is a close reading of all of his work with a focus on tracing the systematic development of his thought. The overriding objective is to clarify all of McLuhan's thinking, to consolidate it in a fashion which prevents misreading, and to open the way to advancing his own program: ensuring that the world does not sleepwalk into the twenty-first century with nineteenth-century perceptions.

One of the most widely-read thinkers writing today, Slavoj Žižek's work can be both thrilling and perplexing in equal measure. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed is the most up-to-date guide available for readers struggling to master the ideas of this hugely influential thinker. Unpacking the philosophical references that fill Žižek's writings, the book explores his influences, including Lacan, Kant, Hegel and Marx. From there, a chapter on 'Reading Žižek' guides the reader through the ways that he applies these core theoretical concepts in key texts like Tarrying With the Negative, The Ticklish Subject and The Parrallax View and in his books about popular culture like Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Symptom! Major secondary writings and films featuring Žižek are also covered.

A complete introduction to Modernist writers, ideas and movements, this book considers the precursors as well as the legacy of Modernist Literature in a clear, accessible manner.

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.