JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

Figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Marshall McLuhan have lauded Joyce for his unusual awareness of the distinct conventions and characteristics of language as it occurs in different forms (primarily spoken and written). Such commentary usually focuses on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While more formally restrained than Joyce’s two greatest works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Joyce forging the philosophy and aesthetic which consciously treats language in these different forms, implicitly (through, for example, the strategies he develops to represent sound) and explicitly (through, for example, ruminations on the properties of writing and speech). This is shown not least by the fact the book begins not (as is sometimes claimed) at the beginning of Stephen’s life, but at the beginning of his linguistic life, and from the outset uses a variety of print-oriented techniques (such as italicization, indentation, and ellipsis points) to represent the phonic world. This implicitly demonstrates a further distinction, also crucial to Joyce’s later work, not only between speech and writing, but between handwriting and print. The distinction also looms large in A Portrait, which at various times references the manual in a way that emphasizes the labored means of production of the yet-to-be published writer, but also is written very distinctly (as Hugh Kenner observes about Ulysses), for “technological space” or “printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.” It is notable in this context that Joyce rejected one strategy in particular for representing the sounds of speech within the visual medium of writing: non-standard spelling. He experimented with a more phoneticized style in Stephen Hero, but this is largely abandoned by the time it becomes A Portrait. We are left with one notable dialectal spelling: “shite.” The deployment of this word speaks volumes about Joyce’s journey from sound to print.

Abstract:

James Joyce once claimed that his Ulysses (1922) could serve as a basis for a future rebuilding of Dublin. The irony in this regard is that Dublin did indeed irrevocably change during the period he was writing the book. Besides the natural changes a city undergoes in two decades, the Irish struggle for independence during which large parts of the city center were shelled to rubble contributed to the fact that the Dublin Joyce knew had largely disappeared by 1922. With this in mind, I read Ulysses as a site of memory and investigate the role cultural memory plays in the way Dublin is depicted in the novel. There are three ways in which memory is significant in this context. First, rendering his characters’ stream of consciousnesses as they make their ways through Dublin, Joyce’s psychological realism offers, among other things, a literary representation of individual memory. Second, this literary Dublin is a remembered city, based on the recollections and imagination of both Joyce, who had left it years before writing his novel, and the readers who are required to fill numerous gaps and blanks in the vague and unspecific depiction of the cityscape. Third, the novel serves as a mnemonic device that shapes the collective memory of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Regarding the shape and meaning of this remembered Dublin, I will focus on its representation as a colonial city and the ways the political situation is inscribed in the text.

• Penelope Says
• Robert Berry

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Abstract:

Joyce famously composed the tenth episode of Ulysses, “Wandering Rocks,” with painstaking reference to a map of Dublin, becoming, in his words, “a scissors and paste man.” This essay asks—what might it mean to become scissors and paste readers? Radicalizing the form of repetition and interpolation in “Wandering Rocks,” this study conducts an experimental reading of the episode to show how “Wandering Rocks” might intervene on contemporary debates about the structure and representability of the social. Reading “Wandering Rocks” against recent scholarship on the representability of social space, especially that of Bruno Latour and Fredric Jameson, this essay suggests that “Wandering Rocks” provides a thesis regarding the interplay of signs, traces, and complex governing structures that lends nuance to studies of the social, especially regarding the notion of social totality.