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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.

Governance of Knowledge (GovK) and of Organizational Learning (GovL)

Since the mid-twentieth century, knowledge and organizational learning have taken a leading role in public and private organizations, since their value has been acknowledged for building and maintaining competitive advantage and for effective implementation of innovation. Knowledge management monitors, facilitates and manages the processes of creation and internalization of knowledge at the levels of individuals, as well as the sharing, storage, dissemination and institutionalization at the level of groups and organizations, in order to help overcome knowledge-dependent organizational challenges and promote transformation. According to Freire et al. (2021):

Transdisciplinarity is a relatively recent term: it emerged in 1970 in France during an event held to discuss the role of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in university settings, entitled ‘L’interdisciplinarité: problémes d'enseignement et de recherche dans les universités’. During the event, three participants presented and discussed the new concept of transdisciplinarity. Jean Piaget and Andre Lichnerowicz focused on disciplinary relations, while Erich Jantsch addressed the concept from the perspective of social purpose.

The event proceedings (Apostel et al. 1970), with more than 300 pages, were the most important source of reference in the field for a long time, until two other theoretical frameworks were published (Klein 2013): Mode 2 Knowledge Production of Michael Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow (1994) and Basarab Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (1993).

All perspectives, moreover, sought to understand the multidimensionality of reality and the inclusion of social values that dismantle the division into academics (i.e., the experts) and non-academics, fostering new partnerships between university and society. The valorization and increment of these forms of interaction in the pursuit of the unity of knowledge signalled a new form of integration between society and academia, especially for the conduct of scientific research.

The pursuit of the unity of knowledge, in fact, is the epistemological problem highlighted by transdisciplinarity. It dates back to the time of ancient philosophers and has never ceased to be a relevant topic of study. In Morin's words, it flows through time:

In this context, transdisciplinarity is involved in a series of changes that have become necessary to transcend and integrate disciplinary paradigms.

By the later eighteenth century, the domestic Picturesque Tour across the British Isles and Irish Isles had emerged as an alternative to the Grand Tour, with remote parts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales offering exciting destinations for tourists. These regions would become highly attractive during the Napoleonic Wars, when much of Europe was inaccessible for British travellers. Exploration of the wild peripheries of Britain and Ireland was fuelled by the growth of antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture and ruins, and a fascination with the sublimity of nature. Continental Europe offered awe-inspiring landscapes, medieval cathedrals and classical ruins, but William Gilpin's writing on the picturesque suggested that rural Britain could match the wonders of Grand Tourism and the Alps. Domestic picturesque tourism inspired by Gilpin and others provided the opportunity for aesthetic discovery and encounters with cultural difference at manageable risk for the traveller: these ‘localised itineraries’ appealed to a desire ‘to discover closer at hand what is unfamiliar, yet at the same time to harmonize, homogenize, and extend the purview of home’ (Colbert, 2011: 1). Malcolm Andrews has noted ‘something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, “capturing” wild scenes, and “fixing” them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing-room walls’ (Andrews, 1990: 67). As Benjamin Colbert comments, this privileged perspective could ‘elide all questions of identity politics into an aesthetics of landscape’ (Colbert, 2011: 2).

The portrait of the ‘unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich’ and Edward Waverley at the end of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), presenting the Scottish Highlands as a place of raw beauty and glamorous adventure, might appear to epitomise such a tendency:

It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the back-ground.

It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young man of genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist … Beside this painting were hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was generally admired (Scott, 2011: 361).

The verbal repetitions that flicker through Joyce's free indirect style in Dubliners arouse the interpretive unease that Margot Norris describes as an effect of Joyce's style, and point to the intersubjective and ideological make-up of the narration. Norris's vacillation between personifying the narration of the different stories or “merely endow[ing] it with a function” indicates some of the difficult questions raised by Joyce's narration (which are also questions endemic to free indirect style): where do these particular words come from? Do they (and how do they) give rise to the impression of a unique, cohering mind, of a character? While these questions might prompt us to assign words to either a character or a separate function of narration, as is the standard critical response to the braid of free indirect style, this kind of textual unravelling entirely misses the point: Joyce's intricate free indirect style entangles narration and character, such that they produce, respond to, and incorporate one another. Joyce's free indirect style both acts in accordance with a character's needs and desires and destabilizes their self-conception, but even this threat cannot be severed from the character. The free indirect style of Dubliners reveals, and revels in, the textuality of thoughts, such that the characters are produced by a machinery of contagion and repetition that violates any supposed autonomy or self-containment. The culmination of Joyce's repetitions in the final paragraph of “The Dead” highlights what his technique always generates: the simultaneous dissolution and unification of the subject. Like Norris, I consider the narration of Dubliners to be either in “collusion or conflict with one or another figure in the story,” but, for me, that collusion or conflict plays out within the subject itself: if the narration bolsters the character, that bolstering is part of their own defensive strategies; if it undermines the character, that undermining cannot be separated from their internalization of being observed.

Norris's approach to Dubliners examines its “writerly” (following Barthes) composition, finding that since the 80s “we have more and more the sense that in the process of reading the text we are completing it, producing new versions of it, writing it anew.”

Setting the Glocal Scene

Recent decades have seen much talk about globalization. Yet, the term is often treated with little definitional care. What is more, there appears to have been a significant recent shift in the connotations intended by many of those who speak about “globalization.” Until not long ago commonly used as a neutral or in some cases celebratory shorthand for a growing degree of interdependency and interconnectedness spanning national and other boundaries, globalization has of late acquired more negative connotations to many. For instance, in his 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly then-US president Donald Trump set up a dichotomy between “patriots” and “globalists,” unambiguously siding with the former and finding deep fault with the latter. Almost instantly UK Brexiteer Nigel Farage tweeted his support for Donald Trump's speech and with it, one assumes, for the ideological binary it had contained (Euronews, September 25, 2018). In further illustration of how ideas today spread with a previously unknown speed and geographical reach, it did not take long for this juxtaposition of “patriots” to (negatively evaluated) “globalists” to also feature in statements made by Hungarian nationalists and Italian EU sceptics. Reflecting the circulation of figures of speech, the worldviews and political blueprints they contain and help articulate, this was merely one instance, albeit a particularly high-profile one, of some of the phenomena that define our era. These phenomena include our technological ability to share but also contest ideas instantaneously and across vast stretches of space. The issue at hand extends further to a paradox, namely the fact that some of the very illustrations of our global interconnectedness, ideational and technological, simultaneously contain a strong critique of such interconnectedness. The politicians just mentioned thus self-consciously also addressed transnational, if not even global audiences, and they did so by employing the very technological means that partly define our global era, only to advocate a return to something “smaller.” It is safe to conclude that to each of the politicians in question this “smaller” domain is that of the nationstate, which—in such statements—is shorn of all the historical guilt, or even of awareness or any memory of the many atrocities committed in the name of “nations” over the last 200 years.

Attentive readers will have noticed an intertextual allusion in the title of this book to Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Where the latter's title centers on love, this book focuses on sociology; and the syntactical place of “time of cholera” is here taken by “times of glocalization.” The allusion is not accidental. Its intention is easiest to read with regard to the historical moments invoked by Gabriel García Márquez and this book, respectively. The former depicts an earlier historical moment, which—like present circumstances—was also characterized by far-reaching social shifts, experienced as deeply unsettling by some of the novel's protagonists; by environmental degradation, particularly the problem of waste and the depletion of natural resources; and, as the novel's title makes clear, an epidemic constitutes the backdrop to García Márquez’ story of entwined biographies and loves. Set in a very specific geographical location and in a different time (i.e., in Colombia from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth centuries), the historical circumstances that frame Love in the Time of Cholera offer intriguing points of similarity, difference and comparison for the here and now.

The allusion is more subtle when it comes to love and sociology. What, if anything, might love and sociology have in common? Without wanting to stretch the analogy too far, sociology—like love—demands commitment, care, and passion. Like love, sociology requires focused and personal investment, namely in the “social.” Whatever else love is, and I certainly will not attempt a comprehensive definition of love (if such a definition was even possible), it needs a purpose, an “object” or a “recipient,” it is directed at something or, more often, at someone. Like those in love, sociologists need to be invested in that which constitutes the focus of their attention. We need to be invested in the social; the social—which by definition implicates others and transcends any individual—has to intrigue and pull us in. It needs to matter to us. Without a fascination with what happens in the spaces and relations between people, between individuals and their wider worlds, it would seem impossible to do sociology. To be fascinated by something means that we pay sustained attention to “it.” Quick, purportedly easy answers will not do for those who are fascinated. Our era's obsession with asking individuals for quick soundbites of “what they think” is not sociology.