About the Book
An introduction to the fascinating world
of Joyce's manuscripts
This
book shows how the creative process of modernist writer James Joyce can be
reconstructed from his manuscripts. Daniel Ferrer offers a practical
demonstration of the theory of genetic criticism, the study of the manuscript
and textual development of a literary text. Using a concrete approach focused
on the materiality of Joyce's writing process, Ferrer demonstrates how to
recover the process of invention and its internal dynamics.
Using
specific, detailed examples, Ferrer analyzes the part played by chance in
Joyce's creative process, the spatial dimension of writing, the
genesis of the "Sirens" episode, and the transition from
Ulysses to
Finnegans Wake. The book includes a study of Joyce's mysterious
Finnegans Wake notebooks, examining their
strange form of intertextuality in light of Joyce's earlier forms of
note-taking. Moving beyond the single author perspective, Ferrer contrasts
Joyce's notes alluding to Virginia Woolf's criticism of
Ulysses with Woolf's own notes on the novel's first episodes.
Throughout
this book, Ferrer describes the logic of the creative process as seen in the record
left by Joyce in notebooks, drafts, typescripts, proofs, correspondence, early
printed versions, and other available documents. Each change detected reveals a
movement from one state to another, a new direction, challenging readers to
understand the reasons for each movement and to appreciate the wealth of
information to be found in Joyce's manuscripts.
A
volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sam Slote
