Description
Book SynopsisAs unusual or esoteric as the subject might seem, Joyce’s punctuation offers a way to study and appreciate his stylistic innovations and the materiality of his textual productions. Joyce’s shunning of what he called “perverted commas” and the general absence of punctuation in Molly Bloom’s monologue are only the most infamous instances of a deeply idiosyncratic and changeable use of punctuation. The essays collected in Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation investigate ellipses, parentheses, commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons, full stops, and even diacritics to explore a surprising array of contingent subjects: Joyce’s working relationships with publishers; questions of editing and translation; hermeneutic and epistemological dilemmas and reading strategies; linguistic nationalisms; the ideological effects of regulated writing; and more. This book is sure to edify and intrigue “fullstoppers” and “semicolonials” alike.
Table of ContentsAbbreviations “Introduction”, Elizabeth M. Bonapfel & Tim Conley “Errant Commas and Stray Parentheses”, Fritz Senn “Espacement, the final frontier”, Sam Slote “In Between the Sheets: Sexy Punctuation in American Magazines”, Amanda Sigler “Marking Realism in Dubliners”, Elizabeth M. Bonapfel “The Poetics of the Unsaid: Joyce’s Use of Ellipsis between Meaning and Suspension”, Annalisa Volpone “‘By Dot and Dash System’: Punctuation and the Void in ‘Ithaca’”, Teresa Prudente “‘(hic sunt lennones!)’: Reading and Misreading the Wake’s ‘Signs of Suspicion’”, Paul Fagan “Fullstoppers and Fools Tops: The “Compunction” of Punctuation and Geometry in Finnegans Wake”, Federico Sabatin “Diacritic Aspirations and Servile Letters: Alphabets and National Identities in Joyce’s Europe”, Tekla Mecsnóber “Punctuated Equilibria and the Exdented Dash”, Erik Bindervoet & Robbert-Jan Henkes “‘Tuck in your blank!’: Antiaposiopetic Joyce”, Tim Conley List of Contributors
