Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction: language(s) with a difference
- Chapter 2 Syntactic glides
- Chapter 3 ‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories
- Chapter 4 Madonnas of Modernism
- Chapter 5 Theoretical modelling: Joyce's women on display
- Chapter 6 The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze
- Chapter 7 ‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing
- Chapter 8 Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 9 Border disputes
- Chapter 10 Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Ex sterco Dantis: Dante's post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake
- Chapter 12 No symbols where none intended: Derrida's war at Finnegans Wake
- Works cited
- Index
Chapter 1 - Introduction: language(s) with a difference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction: language(s) with a difference
- Chapter 2 Syntactic glides
- Chapter 3 ‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories
- Chapter 4 Madonnas of Modernism
- Chapter 5 Theoretical modelling: Joyce's women on display
- Chapter 6 The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze
- Chapter 7 ‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing
- Chapter 8 Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 9 Border disputes
- Chapter 10 Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Ex sterco Dantis: Dante's post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake
- Chapter 12 No symbols where none intended: Derrida's war at Finnegans Wake
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.
(Goethe)JOYCE'S LINGUISTIC POETICS/POLITICS
Joyce's attempts to harness the effects of language and, increasingly with time, languages, may arguably be selected as the feature of his writing which mostly conditioned its technical transformations. Indeed, it is hard for a newcomer to the ever-expanding world of Joyce studies to miss the several time-worn pronouncements made by Joyce himself or, vicariously, by friends and fictional alter egos about his felt need to transcend the barriers of expressiveness set by the systems of existing languages. Though such neat polemical slogans have too often been taken as programmatic, to the detriment of the elements of chance and fluidity that Joyce was increasingly willing to admit into the mechanics of literary composition, there is no denying that Joyce's oeuvre is best seen as constantly trying to inform an evolutive linguistic poetics – one which, I wish to contend, conditions, and therefore should remain central to, whatever interpretive avenue we choose to explore.
(R)evolutions
Although Joyce seemed to embark with each new work on a radically different experiment in literary language, it is more helpful to see the whole Joycean output as a discrete continuum in which apparently new departures in fact redeployed earlier narrative-linguistic habits in a different guise.
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- James Joyce and the Difference of Language , pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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