Pedestrian perils on the road to Irish identity in Joyce and Bowen

This article identifies and explores some major facets of an important theme in the works of James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen that adds to our understanding of the complex ways in which both writers construed Irishness. Striving to acknowledge what they saw as the value of walking without embracing its English nationalist or Romantic associations, these modernists depict walking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland as a beneficial means of expressing and experimenting with different permutations of Irish identity, largely because of the opportunity it presented to negotiate a variety of dangers. By emphasising walking’s taxing and often perilous material realities, Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and Bowen in Seven Winters and The Last September recast the idealised English Romantic view of walking as a darker and more menacing activity that nevertheless offers a useful strategy for articulating fluctuating conceptions of Irishness during the tumultuous period lasting roughly from the death of Parnell through to the Irish War of Independence.     

Sex,Fashion, Work: James Joyce and the Late-Victorian Actress

This article considers the presence of three late-Victorian actresses (Mrs Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, and Sarah Bernhardt) in the work of James Joyce. The first appears in Joyce’s short story ‘A Mother’ (Dubliners). The strong influence of the other two is also detectable in the characterization of Ulysses’ heroines, Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom, and in a seminal text of late modernism, Finnegans Wake. In ‘A Mother’, Joyce’s attention to the importance of fashion on the stage and to poor working conditions for female performers calls to mind the career of Mrs Patrick Campbell. In Ulysses, Gerty’s performance in ‘Nausicaa’ recalls the techniques of the Ibsenian actress Eleonora Duse, known especially for her blushing; I argue that, given this famous skill and Joyce’s fascination with her, Duse directly informs Gerty’s characterization. Finally, Molly Bloom’s repertoire of dramatic references, including Trilby, Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, publicity photographs, and Pineroticism, suggests Joyce’s immersion in a late-Victorian dramatic world. After sketching these connections in detail, I show that his interest in these actresses encourages scholars to continue to question the validity of traditional periodization boundaries. I end by arguing that the appearance of these actresses in these examples of early, high, and late modernism indicates the cultural richness of the long nineteenth century for Joyce, which continues throughout modernism’s successive phases.     

James Joyce: Steps towards a Diagnosis

Authors whose scholarship is in the golden realm of English literature have not hesitated to make pronouncements on James Joyce’s health. A publication in this genre claims he had tabes dorsalis. One feels that an authoritative comment, accepting or rejecting a diagnosis of neurosyphilis, should be provided by the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.     

James Joyce: steps towards a diagnosis

Authors whose scholarship is in the golden realm of English literature have not hesitated to make pronouncements on James Joyce's health. A publication in this genre claims he had tabes dorsalis. One feels that an authoritative comment, accepting or rejecting a diagnosis of neurosyphilis, should be provided by the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.     

Rhetoric and pragmatics in Ulysses: how Joyce invented Twitter

Particularly upon their first appearance, Twitter and James Joyce’s unique style had to face similarly infamous charges in that they were both accused of slowly but inexorably corrupting the English language. In fact, the linguistic practices – stylemes in the case of Ulysses – breeding such corruption are often the same: clippings, abbreviations, the dropping out of inflexional endings, omissions, ellipses, the overabundance of acronyms, creative compound words and blends, symbolisations and onomatopoeias, lexicalisations of (often) vernacular pronunciations. This paper sets out to investigate these features, their rhetorical effect and pragmatic function in order to explore the epistemological, perceptive and social context which made it possible a hundred years ago for an Irish modernist to anticipate how English was to be used on today’s social media and on Twitter in particular.