The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida »

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, while 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 Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Derrida, Borg challenges the assumption that Joycean time is organized around the idea of a totalizing present. Emphasizing his treatment of time as a force of measureless passing, Borg offers a better understanding of Joyce's endeavour to characterize time as a multiplicity that resists representation or objective measurement, and its role as a central theme and structural element in his later work.

About the Author:
Ruben Borg is a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and associate editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

Abbreviations     viii
Acknowledgements     ix
Time's Nature     1
Time of the Novel or Time of the Immarginable     6
Penelope     13
Providence I: The Machinery of Narrative Production     17
Providence II: A Science of Translation     24
Time in Figures     33
Stolentelling and the Modernity of Finnegans Wake     39
Two Types of Multiplicity     44
The Economies of Desire and Waste     53
The Costs of Narcissism, or a Portrait of the Artist as Another Man     56
Making Time     64
Productivity of the Portmanteau     67
Logic of the Sentence     77
Paronomasia     82
Dyas in his Machina, or the Future of Time without Man     92
The Rhetoric of Memory     101
Living Death     104
Redismemberment I: Invoking Mnemosyne     112
Redismemberment II: Encryption     118
Remembering to Forget     130
Technologies of Forgetting     133
The Ciclometer as Internal Cinematograph     139
Notes     142
Bibliography     151
Index     157