Joyce's Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in <em>Finnegans Wake</em>

Bonapfel

doi:10.2979/jmodelite.42.4.05

Solving the Problem of Babel

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jesse Schotter

Keyword(s):

New Media ◽

James Joyce ◽

Illuminated Manuscripts ◽

Finnegans Wake ◽

Linguistic Differences ◽

Universal Language ◽

Basic English

By situating James Joyce within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel, this chapter show how hieroglyphs were used to make arguments for the origin of linguistic differences. The journal transition—in which Joyce’s work was serialized—served as a clearinghouse for ideas about how a new linguistic unity might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake-ese or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s universal language of Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce in Ulysses andFinnegans Wake turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphs, advertisements, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of ‘Aryan’ language and imagine a more inclusive origin for the world’s cultures. The commonality of writing and new media become in Joyce a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races and languages in a mythic past against Nazi claims for racial purity.

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Joyce's Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegans Wake

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/mod.2016.0134 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 179-205 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Cliff Mak

Keyword(s):

Cultural Authority ◽

Finnegans Wake ◽

Giordano Bruno ◽

Beast Fable

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.

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Fin

10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Keyword(s):

Gertrude Stein ◽

Silent Film ◽

Film Criticism ◽

Gestalt Theory ◽

Finnegans Wake ◽

Dorothy Richardson ◽

Sound Film ◽

Final Work

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.

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