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

from Part III - Invention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

By
Katherine Ebury
Edited by
Margaret Kelleher  and
James O'Sullivan
Margaret Kelleher
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
James O'Sullivan
Affiliation:
University College Cork
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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.

Keywords

ModernismJames Joycetimetimepiecesthe body
Type
Chapter
Information
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 201 - 216
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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