| Description |
When James Joyce first published Ulysses in 1922, he was at the forefront of a literary movement that would forever change our conceptions of textuality. In crafting a text that contained intentional grammatical and syntactic errors, Joyce, I will argue, created a scenario in which a text's material instantiation become crucial to its meaning. Texts were no longer material reflections of an author's idealized original that might possess errors needing to be corrected. Instead, those material errors became a legitimate part of the text. The canonical importance of error in Ulysses, as well as its privileging of mechanical modes of production (especially the typewriter), creates a scenario, I will attempt to show, that requires a conception of the text as procedural and durational. The text is not complete after its first printing. I will then attempt to explore what I believe to be the most prominent implications of Joyce's text by examining one particular strain of contemporary writing: rewritten texts. Joycean textuality allows for texts to continue even after the deaths of their original authors: when Jacqueline Valencia rewrites Ulysses by hand, she is creating a new, authentic edition of the text and thus continuing the durational process of Ulysses' textuality. In addition to Valencia's text, I will also look at Simon Morris' blogged retyping of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, Amanda Hurtado's typewritten reproducation of Clark Coolidge's Space and Tim Youn's erroneous recreation of Charles Bukowski's Post Office, Through the lens of these contemporary works, I hope to fully theorize the radical implications of Ulysses for literature and textuality: namely, the ascendance of materiality and process. |
