Ruben Borg – författare

By examining the relation between time and processes of figuration in James Joyce's later work, this ground-breaking study identifies his attempt to engage with the philosophical problem of describing time's characteristic movement whilst acknowledging the impossibility of reducing this movement to anything that can be observed, represented or even experienced. Ruben Borg argues that this problem informs the narrative structure, imagery and complex rhetorical strategies in Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Derrida, Borg challenges the assumption that Joycean time is organised around the idea of a totalising present. Emphasising his treatment of time as a force of measureless passing, Borg offers a better understanding of Joyce's endeavour to characterise time as a multiplicity that resists representation or objective measurement and its role as a central theme and structural element in his later work.

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O'Brien's art. The organising theme of Gallows Humour These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O'Brien's modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.