1,720,962 research outputs found
How a Picture No-Longer Held us Captive: Playful Logics and Creativity Across Media
No full textExperimental creative texts can prompt audiences to re-evaluate their relationship to seemingly banal media and question the underpinning logics of communications and data-based technologies. This chapter explores such effects in two case studies created nearly fifty years apart: Eduardo Paolozzi's experimental artwork Moonstrips Empire News (1967) and J.R. Carpenter's digital poem The Gathering Cloud (2016). We show how these artist-poets engage with the computational and technological logics of their time, using visual experimentation, layered imagery and text, and playful engagement with audiences. Looking particularly at their response to Cold War satellite technologies and twenty-first century Cloud data storage, we argue that the techniques of these texts deliberately replicate, and expose, established structures and systems in a way that consistently invites their viewers to look again and move beyond the habitual and familiar
How a Picture No-Longer Held us Captive: Playful Logics and Creativity Across Media
No full textExperimental creative texts can prompt audiences to re-evaluate their relationship to seemingly banal media and question the underpinning logics of communications and data-based technologies. This chapter explores such effects in two case studies created nearly fifty years apart: Eduardo Paolozzi's experimental artwork Moonstrips Empire News (1967) and J.R. Carpenter's digital poem The Gathering Cloud (2016). We show how these artist-poets engage with the computational and technological logics of their time, using visual experimentation, layered imagery and text, and playful engagement with audiences. Looking particularly at their response to Cold War satellite technologies and twenty-first century Cloud data storage, we argue that the techniques of these texts deliberately replicate, and expose, established structures and systems in a way that consistently invites their viewers to look again and move beyond the habitual and familiar
Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition
No full textThis book offers a critical edition of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies” (c.1901-04). The epiphanies are among Joyce’s earliest literary compositions, a series of highly polished miniatures that provide a vivid insight into his art. Composed concurrently with Chamber Music, they are often regarded as lyrical counterparts to Joyce’s poetry, but alongside prose-poems, almost half are in dramatic form, and several combine the two modes, providing a bridge to Joyce’s fiction. Since Joyce reused thirty of them, often repeatedly, in his subsequent works, through to Finnegans Wake, they make a significant contribution to major works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Indeed, the epiphanies offer a point of origin for Joyce’s oeuvre, providing a paradigm case for scholars to study the development of Joyce’s oeuvre.
NB: this book is under contract with the University Press of Florida; it has not yet been published
Panepiphanal World
Get PDFPanepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce’s writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce’s entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies—silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity—as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce’s oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce’s career. MacDuff compares Joyce’s concept of epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce’s epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce’s contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot
Joyce's Transcendental Aesthetics of Epiphany
No full textThe modern literary epiphany is usually regarded as a subjective, secular experience, but I argue that Daedalus's theory of epiphany in Stephen Hero constitutes an aesthetics of transcendence. Epiphanies traditionally present divine apparitions, and Daedalus's definition of epiphany as a “sudden spiritual manifestation” strongly suggests a transcendental event. In contrast to traditional theophanies, though, his theory draws on the poetics of Wordsworth and Shelley, who reimagine the epiphany as a rapturous, but immanent, experience of the sublime. In doing so, they internalise the epiphany, but from an Idealist perspective, the Romantic revelation remains a transcendental moment in which the Godlike infinitude of nature and/or the mind is shown forth. Indeed, Wordsworth's epiphanies have all the hallmarks of the Kantian sublime, so that Kant's “Analytic of the Sublime” can be used to understand a Romantic aesthetics of transcendence. If Daedalus's theory is essentially Romantic, it follows that Kant's aesthetics also illuminate Stephen Hero, but I argue that they do so in a different way to Wordsworth, by opening up the possibility of a new transcendence, not in the wonder of the starry heavens or the moral law within, but in the sublimity of language itself
James Joyce's epiphanies
No full textThis thesis reexamines the forty short texts Joyce called “epiphanies” (c.1901-04) and the use he made of them in his subsequent work, arguing that Joyce's “earliest important literary compositions” remain important until his last, Finnegans Wake. To the extent that Joyce's oeuvre can be considered as “one great work,” the epiphanies lie at its origin, both temporally and as an originary stage of development. Thus, I argue that the genesis of Stephen Hero and Portrait can be traced back to the epiphanies, which form the “principal building blocks” of his novels; as an ensemble of discrete, but interconnected texts, their structure also bears comparison to Dubliners, Ulysses and the Wake. Building on Litz's claim that the two types of epiphany, dramatic and lyrical, represent “the twin poles of Joyce's art,” I trace Joyce's stylistic development through the epiphanies, Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses, showing how Joyce's linguistic experimentation points to silence and repetition as the fundamental charge of each pole. This nucleus originates in Joyce's epiphanies, but its semantic energy sets off a chain reaction that leads to Finnegans Wake. At the same time, Joyce's texts are increasingly self-reflexive, ensuring that their physical properties are always apparent: materiality and reflexivity manifest two sides of the same sign. To put this into context, whilst Joyce maintains a stronger connection to Classical and biblical theophanies than has hitherto been recognised, his epiphanies differ from traditional or Romantic revelations to the extent that they are textual manifestations. Indeed, I argue that Joyce's epiphanies are purely linguistic phenomena, whose defining characteristics – silence, repetition, materiality and self-reflexivity – show forth the constituent features of language
"Scrupulous Meanness", Joyce's Gift and the Symbolic Economy of Dubliners
No full textIn 1906 Joyce informed his publisher that he intended to write “a chapter of the moral history” of Ireland “in a style of scrupulous meanness” with “Dublin for the scene.” Dubliners is famously economical, if not miserly, and Joyce treats his subjects somewhat harshly, but the sparseness of the stories is complemented by richly symbolic passages in which Joyce's poetic gifts shine through. This lyrical-symbolic mode would seem to run counter to the “scrupulous meanness” of Dubliners, but Mark Osteen argues that Joyce reconciles spendthrift habits with bourgeois thrift to create an aesthetic economy of the gift, where loss is gain. This analysis suggests that Joyce's poetic gifts are compensated, both artistically and financially, by putting literary language into circulation. Osteen, Ellmann and others have demonstrated the importance of Joyce's circulating systems, but I will argue that breaks in circulation are equally significant, and that, paradoxically, it is the gaps where language breaks down that put the signifying system into motion. Analysing “Two Gallants,” I will suggest that this paradox provides the key to Joyce's symbolic economy, where the withholdings of textual lacunae become portals of unlimited growth, while the riches of symbolic proliferation always contain a Midas touch of loss
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