Joyce's Practice of Intertextuality: The Anticipation of Hypermedia and its Implications for Textual Analysis of Finnegans Wake [2000, rptd. 2008]

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.