Book Description

This is a collection by diverse hands on the thematic, conceptual and contextual impact of time in and around Joyce's Finnegans Wake. In keeping with the practice of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation workshops, from one of which, over Easter 1992, the collection developed, many essays emphasize the local temporal textures of Finnegans Wake through close readings of individual passages. However, this does not preclude fruitful interaction with wider contexts and theoretical concerns. Two articles are detailed studies of social and political contemporary contexts with which Joyce's last work was in dialogue. Three more explore philosophical, psychological and scientific theories of time which Joyce exploited and transformed in his text. Two essays relate Finnegans Wake to discussions of time in French feminist and deconstructive theory: and finally, four essays concentrate on the temporality of composition - two apiece on each of the chronology of Joyce's early note-taking and draft processes. The collection should prove interesting to all readers and critics of Joyce as well as to critics concerned with the problem of historicizing and contextualising the temporally disruptive texts of high modernism and early postmodernism.