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

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
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.

Joyce and Geometry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciaran McMorran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Mapping Space ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The World ◽  
Giordano Bruno

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system came to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, “[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?” By examining James Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this book explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing the visible world; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualized. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré, and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it examines how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in Finnegans Wake. In particular, this book sheds new light on Joyce’s fascination with the “geometry of language” practiced by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any detail.

scholarly journals Joyce...Bruno...Ulysses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael I. García León
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
General Consideration ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Giordano Bruno

Abstract:Giordano Bruno has been a philosopher traditionally connected to James Joyce. Nevertheless, Bruno’s influence has been associated to Joyce’s last and enigmatic work, Finnegans Wake. Apart from this general consideration, this paper tries to prove that Joyce’s youth readings on Giordano Bruno were a serious infuence on his most famous work Ulysses. Although it might be true that Joyce did not read Bruno as a primary source –he, indeed wrote a review on a book on the Italian thinker, we can conclude that Bruno was an important source on Joyce before he even conceived writing Finnegans Wake.Key words: James Joyce, Giordano Bruno, Literature and Philosophy, Ulysses, “all in all” theory.Resumen:Giordano Bruno ha sido un filósofo que se suele relacionar con la obra de James Joyce. Sin embargo, la influencia de Bruno se suele asociar con la última y enigmática obra del irlandés, Finnegans Wake. Amén de esta consideración general, este artículo intenta demostrar que las lecturas juveniles de Joyce fueron una influencia seria en su obra más conocida, Ulises. Si bien puede ser cierto que no leyó a Bruno en el original, publicó una reseña sobre el pensador italiano y podemos concluir que Bruno fue una fuente importante en Joyce antes de que ni siquiera concibiera la escritura de Finnegans Wake.Palabras clave: James Joyce, Giordano Bruno, Literatura y filosofía, Ulises, teoría de “todo está en todo”

5. Finnegans Wake

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Colin MacCabe
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
The Family ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Take All

‘Finnegans Wake’ assesses James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempted to write a book which would take all history and knowledge for its subject matter and the workings of the dreaming mind for its form. Four themes surround the book: language, the family, sexuality, and death. In Joyce’s attempt to break away from the ‘evidences’ of conventional narrative with its fixed causality and temporality, two Italian thinkers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, were of profound importance in the writing of Finnegans Wake. Bruno and Vico are used in Finnegans Wake to aid the deconstruction of identity into difference and to replace progress with repetition.

Manga Shakespeare and Cervantes: Trash or Reclamation?

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
Penny Brown
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
Size And Shape ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
Visual Skills

This paper considers the merit of manga versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha which employ the impressionistic techniques of the Japanese comic format to create new, dynamic texts. Such multimodal texts demand different verbal and visual skills to decode the synergy between word and image and elements like the page layout, the size and shape of images and speech balloons and the style of lettering. Far from debasing the cultural authority of the originals by blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture, these versions can be seen as an act of salvage of the original texts from the perceived difficulties of challenging language and content, reinvigorating them with a vibrant immediacy. By making demands on the imagination and intellect in exciting ways, they may also salvage the act of reading itself by encouraging a young or reluctant readership, as well as the already enthusiastic, to explore new ways of engaging with a text.

Solving the Problem of Babel

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.

George Barker in the 1930s: Narcissus and the Autodidact

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-268
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Classical Mythology

This article traces the complex and potent role of classical mythology in the poet George Barker's work of the 1930s. Noting Geoffrey Grigson's rage about ‘narcissism’ when reviewing Barker in 1935 it shows why this barb was more perceptive and apposite – in acknowledging an obsession with both a figure and an overtly classical precedent – than the acclamation given to Barker at the time, from T. S. Eliot among others. Central to the article is an exploration of Barker's heterodox version of a common modernist urge: encountering and reworking of fractured myths. For the radical and ever-present notions of uncertainty with which classical tales and Gods are treated in Barker's work is also revelatory of the autodidactic process – incomplete, unstable, and without class-annotated cultural authority – by which he gained such knowledge. The article thus situates Barker within a cultural matrix, and draws renewed attention to the pluralities of poetry within 1930s Britain.

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