Theall, "Joyce's Practice of Intertextuality: The Anticipation of Hypermedia and
Its Implications for Textual Analysis of Finnegans Wake"
Abstract
Living within the same historical frame that
produced Vannevar Bush's Memex – a period marked by the rise of contemporary
technoculture – Joyce, from the perspective of a cultural producer, intuitively
recognized the emergence of digital culture. Joyce's treatment anticipates
such cybernetic concepts as code, surprise or deviation, memory storage,
non-linearity, transversality, link, frame and even, with a very slight
stretch of hermeneutic imagination, bit and bite. He is most likely the
earliest writer to practice so comprehensively, complexly and exhaustively
the poetic strategies of intertextuality – or perhaps more properly, of
interdiscursivity.
Résumé
Contemporain du Memex de Vannavar Bush et de la montée de la technoculture moderne, Joyce reconnut intuitivement l'émergence de la culture digitale. Son oeuvre anticipe des concepts cybernétiques tels que le code, la surprise ou la déviation, le stockage en mémoire, la non-linéarité, la transversalité, le lien, le cadre et même, si on se permet un peu d'imagination herméneutique, le bit et l'octet. Il serait vraisemblablement le premier auteur à mettre en oeuvre de façon compréhensive, complexe et exhaustive les diverses stratégies poétiques de l'intertextualité ou, pour être plus exact, de l'interdiscursivité.