Reading Joycean Temporalities

Book excerpt: In Reading Joycean Temporalities, Jolanta Wawrzycka gathered scholars who address James Joyce’s experimental treatment of narrative time in terms that go beyond the much-discussed monologue intérieur and stream of consciousness. Contributors examine Joyce’s attempts to render temporal simultaneity through inescapably spatial means of language, including his deployment of Lessing’s concepts of nacheinander and nebeneinander; analyse Joyce’s handling of modalities of time, (in)finitude and temporal disharmonies in time/sense; and tackle Joyce’s engagements with historical time, Homeric time, and with poetic “markers of time”. The essays re-contextualize modernist and postmodernist critical, theoretical, philosophical and narratological polemics on time/temporality, relativity, language, and memory, and offer insightful readings of Joyce’s “double-timing”, “writing of finitude”, “time without measure”, and psychological vs. mechanically measured time. Contributors are: Valérie Bénéjam, Tim Conley, Erika Mihálycsa, Stephanie Nelson, Christine O’Neill, Cóilín Owens, Fritz Senn, Annalisa Volpone and Jolanta Wawrzycka.