Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2019
Abstract
This essay attempts to evaluate the legacy of James Joyce's avant-gardism for the literary experimentation of Mark Amerika, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Mark Z. Danielewski, three contemporary American writers and artists, working a hundred years after the first of Joyce's crucial four "shocks of the new" shook the foundations of fiction.
Positing a threefold legacy of Joyce's "revolution of the word" in its treatment of writing as trace, forgery, and idiom, the essay discusses Amerika's Grammatron, Goldsmith's uncreative writing, and Danielewski's House of Leaves as continuing in the achievements of Ulysses and Finnegans Wak