Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan

Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

  • Offers a completely novel approach to multilingual writing by and beyond Joyce
  • Provides the only study of Finnegans Wake’s Russian translations
  • Stands out as an original and timely feminist intervention into Finnegans Wake

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (PMEL)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (6 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

Reviews

“Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading, is a bold and remarkable endeavor that aims at making Finnegans Wake readable by tackling squarely its most obvious but also most obfuscating dimension: dense multilingualism. … This book offers a solid scholarly contributionto Joyce and to all these domains, and it will remain on our shelves for a long time.” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Vol. 35 (1), 2021)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, York, UK

    Boriana Alexandrova

About the author

Dr. Boriana Alexandrova is Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK. She has published on Irish modernism, multilingualism, translation, and disability. She works across several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, English, German, and Italian, and her work employs a wide range of methodological approaches from disability theory, the medical humanities, feminist, queer, and cultural theory, phenomenology, trauma studies, and performance. Her work beyond Joyce engages with writers and artists including Eimear McBride, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Margaret Randall, and Marina Abramović.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us