Joyce and Geometry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciaran McMorran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Mapping Space ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The World ◽  
Giordano Bruno

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system came to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, “[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?” By examining James Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this book explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing the visible world; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualized. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré, and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it examines how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in Finnegans Wake. In particular, this book sheds new light on Joyce’s fascination with the “geometry of language” practiced by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any detail.

“Writings of Paraboles”

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-50
Author(s):  
Ciaran McMorran
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Absolute

This chapter explores how James Joyce interrogates the traditional procedures through which geometric symbols of "perfection and the divine”—including the concept of the infinitely straight line—are first acquired. By referring to Joyce’s early readings of Euclid’s Elements and other geometric texts including the works of Giordano Bruno, it examines how geometry is presented as a traditional system of ideal objectivities in II.2. More specifically, it demonstrates how the schoolchildren’s senseless application of the Wakean classbook’s instructions, and their attempted measurements of the visible world, reflects Bruno’s and Edmund Husserl’s congruent concerns regarding the practice of geometry as a “tradition emptied of sense.” This chapter also sheds light on Joyce’s application of non-Euclidean concepts by referring to his manuscript drafts for II.2, illustrating how non-Euclidean concepts stemming from the works of Bruno and Henri Poincaré are developed within the context of ALP’s curved bodily and terrestrial forms. More generally, this chapter illustrates how Joyce disrupts the univocity of Euclidean symbols by referring to non-Euclidean alternatives, questioning the absolute rectitude (i.e., correctness) of Euclidean geometry. In doing so, it argues, Joyce responds to a history of uncertainty regarding Euclid’s parallel postulate which began over two thousand years ago.

Joyce's Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegans Wake

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Mak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Beast Fable

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

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