Writing Joyce : a semiotics of the Joyce system /

In Writing Joyce, Lorraine Weir proposes a paradigm shift in Joyce studies away from the preoccupation with referential mimesis and toward a theory of processual mimesis and a materialist semiotics. Rather than emphasize plot, character, and psychology, Weir approaches A Portrait of the Artist as a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Weir, Lorraine, 1946-
Corporate Author: Project Muse
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1989
Bloomington : Indiana University Press ©1989
Bloomington : 1989
1989
Series:Advances in semiotics
Book collections on Project MUSE
Subjects:
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Summary:In Writing Joyce, Lorraine Weir proposes a paradigm shift in Joyce studies away from the preoccupation with referential mimesis and toward a theory of processual mimesis and a materialist semiotics. Rather than emphasize plot, character, and psychology, Weir approaches A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake as a system, a memory theater whose mnemonic repertoires readers comprehend according to directives coded in the text. "In Writing Joyce," says Weir, "we encounter the system as a teaching machine, whose purpose is to teach us itself." To write the system is both to invent and to perform it," she writes, " 'invent' in the medieval rhetorical sense of invention, to come upon or discover what is already given and, working with the text, to 'draw out' or foreground its modes of operation. In the process of acquiring competence in the working of the system, to write Joyce is to be written by the system which is 'Joyce.' " Weir's book reconsiders such familiar topoi in Joyce studies as epiphany, catechism, pun/catachresis, and Joycean "music" from within a semiotics of the system as performative discourse. Rejecting postmodernism's construction of high modernism, Writing Joyce seeks an expanded understanding of modernity that reaches back to Gothic pedagogy and to Vico's new science, to a grammatology grounded in a semiotics of the perceived environment as a knowable world. Through the discussion of texts ranging from Ignatius Loyola to Roland Barthes and from Giambattista Vico to Louis Zukofsky, Writing Joyce seeks to formulate the Joyce system in its own terms while expanding the boundaries of literary semiotics
Physical Description:1 online resource (1 online resource xii, 135 pages) : illustrations
1 online resource (xii, 135 pages) : illustrations
Format:Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 122-130) and index
ISBN:0-253-05423-0
0253054230
9780253054234