Finn Fordham | Royal Holloway, University of London (original) (raw)
Papers by Finn Fordham
Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake
This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a s... more This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a survey of critical, scholarly, and theoretical approaches to Joyce's iconic masterpiece. He also analyses in detail the compositional development of certain key passages which describe the artist (Shem) and his project; the river-mother (ALP) and her 'first kiss'; the Oedipal shooting of the universal father (HCE) by the priestly son (Shaun); and the bewitching and curious daughter (Issy). His analyses demonstrate 'genetic' ways of reading the text which illustrate its immense range and playfulness and how these qualities were generated in composition. As well as opening up the densely detailed textuality of the Wake in all its multiplicity, Fordham argues for a relation between the way the text was formed and key aspects of its thematic content: an uprising of particularity and detail against universality, absolutes, and generality. He shows that the proliferation of ...
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Mar 26, 2020
James Joyce literary supplement, 2001
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Sep 1, 2017
Manchester University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2015
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 16, 2010
World literature written in English, 2004
Abstract The hoaxer is not adequately conceived in discourses on postcolonialism and globalizatio... more Abstract The hoaxer is not adequately conceived in discourses on postcolonialism and globalization, despite questions of identity being central to both. Ethnic hoaxes and deceptions thrive in a world of increased migrancy in proportion to the commodification of stereotypes. The global success of the guru is in part a symptom of a persistent Orientalism (though the critique of Orientalism needs updating in a world of increased migrancy), which arguably the guru now exploits for his own benefit partly in revenge on the violence of representation. In a counter‐attack, the guru is perceived as a hoaxer in many representations made by the industries of entertainment and scepticism. The possibility that a guru might be a threat to Western rationalism or even a threatening kind of “national intellectual” (in Fanon's sense) is part of an implicit agenda in these attacks. The attacks, however, do not succeed in their goal of subversion, since they do not recognize the attraction for something that they themselves promote, which we call the ‘global imaginary’. Furthermore, sceptics in particular miss how the guru can always fall back on presenting the world as illusory in order to disarm attacks that focus on their trickery.
Modernism/modernity, 2006
... In the whirligig phantasmagoria of "Circe" the proliferatio... more ... In the whirligig phantasmagoria of "Circe" the proliferation of ghosts is like little in life. ... This is interestingly qualified in Eva Ziarek's piece on "Technology and the Female Body." Using Benjamin, Ziarek identifies an anxiety within modernism about the loss of nature which ...
James Joyce Quarterly, 2014
Journal of European popular culture, Apr 1, 2016
This article examines the relation between, on the one hand, 'An Unknown Land', a moderately popu... more This article examines the relation between, on the one hand, 'An Unknown Land', a moderately popular Utopian fiction written by the Jewish Liberal politician, Herbert Samuel, and, on the other, Samuel's involvement in British policy towards Palestine from World War I to the time of the Arab Uprising (1936-1939). Samuel had been the first High Commisioner of Palestine, from 1922 to 1925 under the British Mandate, and had sympathies with Zionism. In the late 1930s, he resisted (successfully) the various plans proposed to partition Palestine into Jewish, Muslim and specifically British areas. His resistance to partition, however, sits oddly alongside the fiction, in which the threat of sectarian civil war in Utopia is assuaged through a voluntary act of partition, agreed by all parties. It argues that the contradiction does not signal any irony or satire against the condition of Utopia on Samuel's part, but represents both a wish-fulfilment and Samuel's Imperialist political unconscious in which Zionism is a means to an Imperialist end, and is justified as a Utopian triumph of modernity over tradition.
Liverpool University Press eBooks, May 6, 2020
As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body ... more As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.
James Joyce Quarterly, Mar 1, 2008
... Irish/Irish cultural formation, as being intimately related to the same Aryan myth. ... Irish... more ... Irish/Irish cultural formation, as being intimately related to the same Aryan myth. ... Irish republicanism, certainly in the De Valera formulation, became implicated with Aryanism, a development ... and, especially, in the movement that establishes Shaun as the Aryanist/republican who ...
James Joyce Quarterly, 2012
Page 1. Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake Finn ... more Page 1. Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake Finn Fordham University of Nottingham The extent of Lucia Joyce's significance within Finnegans Wake has not been completely ...
Modernism/modernity, 2015
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2011
James Joyce Quarterly, Mar 1, 2008
In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that re... more In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake. The Wake's relation to the multiple-personality phenomenon is well known through the figure of Christine Beauchamp, who is associated with Issy,1 but the theme of multiplicity and multiple personality emerges in early drafts of the Wake independently of her character.2 Rather than provide the details of this emergence or consider its meanings within Finnegans Wake, I will make the case that it grew out of reflections on the composition of Ulysses, in particular "Circe," and the experience of its composition. Such a thesis picks up on Michael Groden's suggestion that "the processes by which [Joyce] wrote the book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning."3 The result is an exercise in a form of biography that seeks to illustrate how, as Ford Madox Ford's biographer Max Saunders says, "[t]he simultaneous processes of living and writing shape each other in complex and often surprising ways."4 While Joyce's characteristic methods of drafting, notetaking, redrafting, and revision had already been established before the composition of Ulysses,5 one aspect of it-the revisions-intensified during the composition of "Circe." Through a genetic account of the progress of "Circe," it is possible to see that Joyce, even before he began its drafting, required a new intensification of the method of multiple revisions he had already crafted. As he conceived, wrote, and rewrote the book, and "Circe" in particular, events around him affected his method. These occurrences included the strong responses of readers: the enthusiasm of the Little Review editors, the refusal of the United States Post Office to carry installments, the burning of certain issues, the action brought against the Little Review in September 1920, and its trial in February 1921. Joyce's growing celebrity (or notoriety) and the circumstances of the writing itself affected his methods. Together these events intensified the escalation of what can be called a strati-
Modern Language Review, Oct 1, 2008
Introduction PART I A. Shem's 'Cyclewheeling History' (185.27-186.10) B. Anna Livia&#... more Introduction PART I A. Shem's 'Cyclewheeling History' (185.27-186.10) B. Anna Livia's 'very first time' (203.16-204.04) PART II 'BUTT: I Shuttm!' (351.36-355.9) PART III 'Nircississies' (526.20-528.24) PART IV Revising character: the Maggies and the Murphys Bibliography
Critical Quarterly, Apr 1, 2002
"It must be difficult to succeed in France where nearly everyone writes well" (LII 202)... more "It must be difficult to succeed in France where nearly everyone writes well" (LII 202)."Not so well as that. He [Flaubert] begins with a fault." (quoted in JJII 492)1Reading the preceding quotes (the first written in Rome and the second said in Paris), one can describe Joyce's relation to French literature, and specifically the nineteenth-century French novel, as one that moved between awe and qualified appreciation. Joyce's attitude to Maupassant, conveyed in a 1905 letter from Trieste to his brother Stanislaus, provides another example: "I agree with you, however, about Maupassant. He is an excellent writer. His tales are a little slipshod but that was hardly to be avoided, given the circumstances of his life" (LII 107). Yet, one lesson of decades of Joyce studies is that Joyce's affairs with writers as well as with countries and their national literatures are beyond love and hatred. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Joyce's quest for a "style," drove him in the direction of French literature (JJII 76): to the contemporary symbolist movement but also, more significantly to the roman that was the hallmark of the previous century.If Joyce once mistakenly accused Flaubert of committing grammatical mistakes in Trois Contes,2 he also exhibited a continued imaginative engagement with the Flaubertian oeuvre as he overcame the difficulties involved in writing well and succeeding within and beyond France-a succes de scandale which grew in a similar way to the successes of Gustave Flaubert and ?mile Zola.3 This volume of essays on Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel examines many previously unexplored facets of the intricate Flaubert-Joyce relationship but its analyses also extend to both ends of the nineteenth-century with contributions on some of Joyce's explicit and implicit responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honor? de Balzac, Victor Hugo and ?mile Zola in Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and in his life, letters, and critical writings. It would take another volume ? and it is an aim of this work that further research be carried out precisely in such a direction ? to investigate further Joyce's relations to other French prose writers of the 19th Century to whom Joyce refers such as: Chateaubriand, Daudet, Huysmans, M?rim?e, Villiers de L' Isle Adam, George Sand, Lautr?amont, Michelet, Quinet, Verne, Dujardin, Mirbeau, and, insofar as they wrote prose, Baudelaire and Mallarme.A study of such a multilayered subject as "Joyce and the Nineteenthcentury French Novel," demands that we first delineate the boundaries and intersections of the intimidatingly expansive space-times: the nineteenthcentury, France, the novel. Graham Robb' s recent study The Discovery of France provides us with probably the most appropriate basic metaphor in this respect. In Robb's journey into some of the physically and conceptually uncharted territories of France, the nineteenth-century emerges as a decisive moment in the gradual "invention" of France as a modern nation while some nineteenth-century novelists, namely Balzac, appear as invisible guides along this exploratory journey.4 France's nineteenth-century can be said to begin in the eighteenth-century, precisely in 1789, with the French Revolution and end in 1889, with Gustave Eiffel's construction of the monumental tower. In this "century," France established some of the foundations of the novel, which is a modern monument and anti-monument in the "edificidal" visions of Hugo in the mid-nineteenth century and Joyce in the early twentieth century.5 "Edificidal" thoughts and realities are endemic to the histories of nineteenth-century France and the nineteenthcentury French novel since both were marked by successive and overlapping revolutions, revolutions of the word and the world, bringing down political, social, and aesthetic monuments and announcing the "new" that often prematurely died only to be revived in other forms in the twentieth century. A quick run of some key moments, personalities, and trends highlights this convulsive history: the 1789 French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Bourbon restoration, romanticism, the July Revolution, realism, 1848 which "marked the last Western European revolution in the classical urban mode,"6 orientalism, the Crimean War, photography, the Second Empire, "to write the mediocre well"7 and indirect free style, the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, naturalism, the bourgeois and "the people," the Haussmannisation of Paris, the symbolist movement, film, "J'accuse". …
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 8, 2022
Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake
This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a s... more This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a survey of critical, scholarly, and theoretical approaches to Joyce's iconic masterpiece. He also analyses in detail the compositional development of certain key passages which describe the artist (Shem) and his project; the river-mother (ALP) and her 'first kiss'; the Oedipal shooting of the universal father (HCE) by the priestly son (Shaun); and the bewitching and curious daughter (Issy). His analyses demonstrate 'genetic' ways of reading the text which illustrate its immense range and playfulness and how these qualities were generated in composition. As well as opening up the densely detailed textuality of the Wake in all its multiplicity, Fordham argues for a relation between the way the text was formed and key aspects of its thematic content: an uprising of particularity and detail against universality, absolutes, and generality. He shows that the proliferation of ...
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Mar 26, 2020
James Joyce literary supplement, 2001
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Sep 1, 2017
Manchester University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2015
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 16, 2010
World literature written in English, 2004
Abstract The hoaxer is not adequately conceived in discourses on postcolonialism and globalizatio... more Abstract The hoaxer is not adequately conceived in discourses on postcolonialism and globalization, despite questions of identity being central to both. Ethnic hoaxes and deceptions thrive in a world of increased migrancy in proportion to the commodification of stereotypes. The global success of the guru is in part a symptom of a persistent Orientalism (though the critique of Orientalism needs updating in a world of increased migrancy), which arguably the guru now exploits for his own benefit partly in revenge on the violence of representation. In a counter‐attack, the guru is perceived as a hoaxer in many representations made by the industries of entertainment and scepticism. The possibility that a guru might be a threat to Western rationalism or even a threatening kind of “national intellectual” (in Fanon's sense) is part of an implicit agenda in these attacks. The attacks, however, do not succeed in their goal of subversion, since they do not recognize the attraction for something that they themselves promote, which we call the ‘global imaginary’. Furthermore, sceptics in particular miss how the guru can always fall back on presenting the world as illusory in order to disarm attacks that focus on their trickery.
Modernism/modernity, 2006
... In the whirligig phantasmagoria of "Circe" the proliferatio... more ... In the whirligig phantasmagoria of "Circe" the proliferation of ghosts is like little in life. ... This is interestingly qualified in Eva Ziarek's piece on "Technology and the Female Body." Using Benjamin, Ziarek identifies an anxiety within modernism about the loss of nature which ...
James Joyce Quarterly, 2014
Journal of European popular culture, Apr 1, 2016
This article examines the relation between, on the one hand, 'An Unknown Land', a moderately popu... more This article examines the relation between, on the one hand, 'An Unknown Land', a moderately popular Utopian fiction written by the Jewish Liberal politician, Herbert Samuel, and, on the other, Samuel's involvement in British policy towards Palestine from World War I to the time of the Arab Uprising (1936-1939). Samuel had been the first High Commisioner of Palestine, from 1922 to 1925 under the British Mandate, and had sympathies with Zionism. In the late 1930s, he resisted (successfully) the various plans proposed to partition Palestine into Jewish, Muslim and specifically British areas. His resistance to partition, however, sits oddly alongside the fiction, in which the threat of sectarian civil war in Utopia is assuaged through a voluntary act of partition, agreed by all parties. It argues that the contradiction does not signal any irony or satire against the condition of Utopia on Samuel's part, but represents both a wish-fulfilment and Samuel's Imperialist political unconscious in which Zionism is a means to an Imperialist end, and is justified as a Utopian triumph of modernity over tradition.
Liverpool University Press eBooks, May 6, 2020
As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body ... more As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.
James Joyce Quarterly, Mar 1, 2008
... Irish/Irish cultural formation, as being intimately related to the same Aryan myth. ... Irish... more ... Irish/Irish cultural formation, as being intimately related to the same Aryan myth. ... Irish republicanism, certainly in the De Valera formulation, became implicated with Aryanism, a development ... and, especially, in the movement that establishes Shaun as the Aryanist/republican who ...
James Joyce Quarterly, 2012
Page 1. Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake Finn ... more Page 1. Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake Finn Fordham University of Nottingham The extent of Lucia Joyce's significance within Finnegans Wake has not been completely ...
Modernism/modernity, 2015
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2011
James Joyce Quarterly, Mar 1, 2008
In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that re... more In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake. The Wake's relation to the multiple-personality phenomenon is well known through the figure of Christine Beauchamp, who is associated with Issy,1 but the theme of multiplicity and multiple personality emerges in early drafts of the Wake independently of her character.2 Rather than provide the details of this emergence or consider its meanings within Finnegans Wake, I will make the case that it grew out of reflections on the composition of Ulysses, in particular "Circe," and the experience of its composition. Such a thesis picks up on Michael Groden's suggestion that "the processes by which [Joyce] wrote the book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning."3 The result is an exercise in a form of biography that seeks to illustrate how, as Ford Madox Ford's biographer Max Saunders says, "[t]he simultaneous processes of living and writing shape each other in complex and often surprising ways."4 While Joyce's characteristic methods of drafting, notetaking, redrafting, and revision had already been established before the composition of Ulysses,5 one aspect of it-the revisions-intensified during the composition of "Circe." Through a genetic account of the progress of "Circe," it is possible to see that Joyce, even before he began its drafting, required a new intensification of the method of multiple revisions he had already crafted. As he conceived, wrote, and rewrote the book, and "Circe" in particular, events around him affected his method. These occurrences included the strong responses of readers: the enthusiasm of the Little Review editors, the refusal of the United States Post Office to carry installments, the burning of certain issues, the action brought against the Little Review in September 1920, and its trial in February 1921. Joyce's growing celebrity (or notoriety) and the circumstances of the writing itself affected his methods. Together these events intensified the escalation of what can be called a strati-
Modern Language Review, Oct 1, 2008
Introduction PART I A. Shem's 'Cyclewheeling History' (185.27-186.10) B. Anna Livia&#... more Introduction PART I A. Shem's 'Cyclewheeling History' (185.27-186.10) B. Anna Livia's 'very first time' (203.16-204.04) PART II 'BUTT: I Shuttm!' (351.36-355.9) PART III 'Nircississies' (526.20-528.24) PART IV Revising character: the Maggies and the Murphys Bibliography
Critical Quarterly, Apr 1, 2002
"It must be difficult to succeed in France where nearly everyone writes well" (LII 202)... more "It must be difficult to succeed in France where nearly everyone writes well" (LII 202)."Not so well as that. He [Flaubert] begins with a fault." (quoted in JJII 492)1Reading the preceding quotes (the first written in Rome and the second said in Paris), one can describe Joyce's relation to French literature, and specifically the nineteenth-century French novel, as one that moved between awe and qualified appreciation. Joyce's attitude to Maupassant, conveyed in a 1905 letter from Trieste to his brother Stanislaus, provides another example: "I agree with you, however, about Maupassant. He is an excellent writer. His tales are a little slipshod but that was hardly to be avoided, given the circumstances of his life" (LII 107). Yet, one lesson of decades of Joyce studies is that Joyce's affairs with writers as well as with countries and their national literatures are beyond love and hatred. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Joyce's quest for a "style," drove him in the direction of French literature (JJII 76): to the contemporary symbolist movement but also, more significantly to the roman that was the hallmark of the previous century.If Joyce once mistakenly accused Flaubert of committing grammatical mistakes in Trois Contes,2 he also exhibited a continued imaginative engagement with the Flaubertian oeuvre as he overcame the difficulties involved in writing well and succeeding within and beyond France-a succes de scandale which grew in a similar way to the successes of Gustave Flaubert and ?mile Zola.3 This volume of essays on Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel examines many previously unexplored facets of the intricate Flaubert-Joyce relationship but its analyses also extend to both ends of the nineteenth-century with contributions on some of Joyce's explicit and implicit responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honor? de Balzac, Victor Hugo and ?mile Zola in Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and in his life, letters, and critical writings. It would take another volume ? and it is an aim of this work that further research be carried out precisely in such a direction ? to investigate further Joyce's relations to other French prose writers of the 19th Century to whom Joyce refers such as: Chateaubriand, Daudet, Huysmans, M?rim?e, Villiers de L' Isle Adam, George Sand, Lautr?amont, Michelet, Quinet, Verne, Dujardin, Mirbeau, and, insofar as they wrote prose, Baudelaire and Mallarme.A study of such a multilayered subject as "Joyce and the Nineteenthcentury French Novel," demands that we first delineate the boundaries and intersections of the intimidatingly expansive space-times: the nineteenthcentury, France, the novel. Graham Robb' s recent study The Discovery of France provides us with probably the most appropriate basic metaphor in this respect. In Robb's journey into some of the physically and conceptually uncharted territories of France, the nineteenth-century emerges as a decisive moment in the gradual "invention" of France as a modern nation while some nineteenth-century novelists, namely Balzac, appear as invisible guides along this exploratory journey.4 France's nineteenth-century can be said to begin in the eighteenth-century, precisely in 1789, with the French Revolution and end in 1889, with Gustave Eiffel's construction of the monumental tower. In this "century," France established some of the foundations of the novel, which is a modern monument and anti-monument in the "edificidal" visions of Hugo in the mid-nineteenth century and Joyce in the early twentieth century.5 "Edificidal" thoughts and realities are endemic to the histories of nineteenth-century France and the nineteenthcentury French novel since both were marked by successive and overlapping revolutions, revolutions of the word and the world, bringing down political, social, and aesthetic monuments and announcing the "new" that often prematurely died only to be revived in other forms in the twentieth century. A quick run of some key moments, personalities, and trends highlights this convulsive history: the 1789 French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Bourbon restoration, romanticism, the July Revolution, realism, 1848 which "marked the last Western European revolution in the classical urban mode,"6 orientalism, the Crimean War, photography, the Second Empire, "to write the mediocre well"7 and indirect free style, the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, naturalism, the bourgeois and "the people," the Haussmannisation of Paris, the symbolist movement, film, "J'accuse". …
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Sep 8, 2022