The following text is taken from the publisher's website:
"James Joyce and the Act of Reception is the first detailed account of Joyce's own engagement with the reception of his work. It shows how Joyce's writing, from the earliest fiction to Finnegans Wake, addresses the social conditions of reading (particularly in Ireland). Most notably, it echoes and transforms the responses of some of Joyce's actual readers, from family and friends to key figures such as Eglinton and Yeats. This study argues that the famous 'unreadable' quality of Joyce's writing is a crucial feature of its historical significance. Not only does Joyce engage with the cultural contexts in which he was read but, by inscribing versions of his own contemporary reception within his writing, he determines that his later readers read through the responses of earlier ones. In its focus on the local and contemporary act of reception, Joyce's work is seen to challenge critical accounts of both modernism and deconstruction."

/pdf/james-joyce-and-the-act-of-reception-reading-ireland-4o5qr44sa3.pdf

James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism

'Land of breach of promise' : James Joyce and America

This article situates Joyce’s work within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel or about how, in a newly globalized world, different cultures and language groups might best communicate with one another. The journal transition —in which Joyce’s work was serialized and whose editor, Eugene Jolas, he knew well—served as a clear-inghouse for ideas about how a new universalism might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake se and other avant-garde experiments or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphics, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of an “Aryan” language and to imagine a more inclusive origin for all the world’s cultures in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ideas of linguistic or media “purity” are allied in Joyce with the danger of Nazi claims for racial purity. His emphasis on the commonality of writing and new media becomes a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races, cultures, and languages in a mythic past.

Verbivocovisuals: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel

Because of its daunting linguistic ambiguity, Finnegans Wake often seems designed merely to baffle. The story’s polysemous complexity, however, may be Joyce’s most potent weapon against censorship. Insinuated throughout the indecipherable narration are sexual terms that were essentially unprintable in 1939. The highly charged diction, moreover, often proceeds to fuse with sly allusions to authors whose works were censored or banned, from Ovid to Edgar Quinet. This veiled aspect only intensifies as apparently unrelated paronomasia references entities that were also once forbidden; items like Eve’s apple, hootch, fez hats, and slot machines constantly cross the narrator’s mind. Through ingeniously subversive language, which can never be precisely pinned down, the text daringly invites—and simultaneously thwarts—its own bowdlerization.

Vicking With the Censors: Joyce's Bold Use of the Suppressed in an Unsuppressed Finnegans Wake

Although Joyce was losing his sight when he wrote Ulysses, Stephen's and Bloom's visual experiences are extraordinarily rich and complex Absorbing the influences of popular visual attractions such as dioramas, stereoscopes and mutoscopes, their perceptions of Dublin are shaped by what Walter Benjamin calls 'unconscious optics' Analyzing closely the texture of their impressions and of Joyce's prismatic narrative styles, Philip Sicker explores the phenomenon of sight from a wide-ranging set of perspectives: eighteenth-century epistemology (Locke and Berkeley), theories of the flaneur (Baudelaire and Benjamin), Italian Futurist art (Marinetti and Boccioni), photography (Barthes and Sontag), and the silent films Joyce watched in Dublin and Trieste The concept of 'spectacle' as a mechanically-constructed visual experience informs Sicker's examination of mediated perception and emerges as a hallmark of modernist culture itself This study is an important contribution to the growing interest in how deeply the philosophy and science of visual perception influenced modernism

Thomas E. Connolly

Papers

James Joyce's Scribbledehobble : the ur-workbook for Finnegans wake

Swinburne's Theory of Poetry@@@The Crowns of Apollo. Swinburne's Principles of Literature & Art. A Study in Victorian Criticism & Aesthetics