Joyce's lifetime bridged the eras of traditional classical thought and modernism, he explained, between 'a 19th-century post-enlightened world and a post-electric integration of poetics and the arts.' is last book emerges at a key moment of transition in technological history, a culminating juncture,' Theall said. 'You can see him generating a whole new set of languages. In his paper on digital media and Joyce, Donald Theall of Trent University in Canada spoke of a 'hypertextual vision of the world' in 'Finnegans Wake,' which the author began writing in 1923 and published in 1939 - 'the dawn of the digital age,' Theall said.

Lowe of Newport, N.H., reiterated the suggestion of one critic that the ideal reader of 'Oxen' would have at his disposal 'pages of notes, structured like a database and navigated by a lightning-fast Boolean search.' In 'Let scholarment and all Malthusists go hang,' his paper on the notoriously difficult 'Ulysses' chapter 'Oxen of the Sun,' independent scholar James F. His works - especially 'Finnegans Wake' - have required thorough decoding and annotation, in addition to repeated readings, for many generations of scholars and readers. In his playful and painstaking reinvention of language, Joyce wove layers of literary and cultural references together more deftly and extensively than any other writer before or since. He died in 1941, before the birth of the computer age, but his work can be seen as both a blueprint of contemporary hypermedia and a rich source for hypertextual applications, several scholars suggested at the 2005 North American James Joyce Conference, held June 14-18 at Cornell.

James Joyce would have been right at home in 21st-century digital culture.

If I Die Before I Wake by Jean Little