The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

(Hardback)

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By examining the relation between time and processes of figuration in James Joyce's later work, this ground-breaking study identifies his attempt to engage with the philosophical problem of describing time's characteristic movement whilst acknowledging the impossibility of reducing this movement to anything that can be observed, represented or even experienced. Ruben Borg argues that this problem informs the narrative structure, imagery and complex rhetorical strategies in Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Derrida, Borg challenges the assumption that Joycean time is organised around the idea of a totalising present. Emphasising his treatment of time as a force of measureless passing, Borg offers a better understanding of Joyce's endeavour to characterise time as a multiplicity that resists representation or objective measurement and its role as a central theme and structural element in his later work.

Reviews

"If, as Ruben Borg masterfully shows, Joyce's ambition was to write a history of time with Finnegans Wake, it could not be a 'short history of time,' something like a universal history, nor even a very long and dark and tangled story about an Irish family. It would have to be an almost infinite and unimaginable experience, a radical attempt to make us relive the origins of language. With a rare blend of literary and philosophical expertise, Borg unfolds hitherto unexplored dimensions of the Wake and inscribes it definitively in a discursive tradition marked by the clash of warring brothers (like Shem and Shaun): Bruno and Vico, Bergson and Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze." - Jean-Michel Rabat, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania -- Jean-Michel Rabat, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, USA
"Borg's text makes a number of interesting connections between the Wake andUlysses ... but this study is noteworthy for also finding important precendents in Dubliners and A Portrait." - MLR -- Craig Monk

Author Bio

Ruben Borgis a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and associate editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas.