About the Book
This book addresses James Joyce's borderlessness and
the ways his work crosses or unsettles boundaries of all kinds. The essays in
this volume position borderlessness as a major key to understanding Joycean
poiesis, opening new doors and new engagements with his work.
Contributors begin by exploring the circulation of
Joyce's writing in Latin America via a transcontinental network of writers and translators,
including José Lezama Lima, José Salas Subirat, Leopoldo Marechal, Eduardo
Desnoës, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Augusto Monterroso. Essays then consider Joyce through the lens of the
sciences, presenting theoretical interventions on posthumanist parasitology in
Ulysses; on Giordano Bruno's coincidence
of opposites in
Finnegans Wake; and
on algorithmic agency in the
Wake.
Cutting-edge cognitive narratology is applied to the "Penelope" episode.
Next, the volume features innovative essays on Joyce
in relation to early animated film and comics, engaging with animated film in
the "Circe" episode, Joyce's points of contact with George Herriman's cartoon
strip
Krazy Kat, and structural
affinities between open-world gaming and
Finnegans
Wake. The final essays focus on abiding human concerns, offering new
research on Joyce's creative use of "spicy books"; a Lacanian consideration of
"The Dead" alongside Katherine Mansfield's "The Stranger" and Haruki Murakami's
"Kino"; and a meditation on Joyce's uncertainties about the boundary between
life and death.
For
Joyce, borders are problems--but
ones that provided precious fodder for his art. And as this volume
demonstrates, they encourage brilliant reflections on his work, from new
scholars to leading luminaries in the field.
A
volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles
