Joyce without Borders

This book addresses James Joyce’s borderlessness andthe ways his work crosses or unsettles boundaries of all kinds. The essays inthis volume position borderlessness as a major key to understanding Joyceanpoiesis, opening new doors and new engagements with his work.

Contributors begin by exploring the circulation ofJoyce’s writing in Latin America via a transcontinental network of writers and translators,including José Lezama Lima, José Salas Subirat, Leopoldo Marechal, EdmundoDesnoës, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Augusto Monterroso. Essays then consider Joyce through the lens of thesciences, presenting theoretical interventions on posthumanist parasitology in Ulysses; on Giordano Bruno’s coincidenceof opposites in Finnegans Wake; andon algorithmic agency in the Wake.Cutting-edge cognitive narratology is applied to the “Penelope” episode.   

Next, the volume features innovative essays on Joycein relation to early animated film and comics, engaging with animated film inthe “Circe” episode, Joyce’s points of contact with George Herriman’s cartoonstrip Krazy Kat, and structuralaffinities between open-world gaming and FinnegansWake. The final essays focus on abiding human concerns, offering newresearch 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 betweenlife and death.

ForJoyce, borders are problems—butones that provided precious fodder for his art. And as this volumedemonstrates, they encourage brilliant reflections on his work, from newscholars to leading luminaries in the field.