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A paper delivered at the CALIFORNIA JOYCE conference (6/30/93) Good afternoon. To quote the opening of Norbert Wiener's address on Cybernetics to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in March of 1950, The word cybernetics has been taken from the Greek word k ....

Middle of Essay
.... and augments the novel's more central journeys, its dangers encountered, and its successful returns. ULYSSES works rather neatly as a cybernetic allegory, in fact, not only in its represented action, but also in its history as a text. The book itself, that is, has reached us only by a devious path around Cyclopean censors and the Scylla and Charybdis of pirates and obtuse editors and publishers. ULYSSES both retells and re-enacts, that is, the Odyssean journey of information that, once sent, is threatened and nearly thwarted before it is finally received. We are talking, of course, of cybernetics avant la lettre -- before Norbert Wiener and others h ....