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1 results

  • Chapter 12 - James Joyce, Irish Modernism, and Watch Technology

  • from Part III - Invention
  • Edited by Margaret Kelleher, University College Dublin, James O'Sullivan, University College Cork
  • Book:
    Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    19 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023, pp 201-216

  • Summary

    Across his career, as the previous work of this chapter’s author and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, M. Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeffrey Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, James Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, including the author’s wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology are looked at, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology.