Resonant Utterances: James Joyce and the Transmission of Voices

The main question confronted in this book is why James Joyce’s characters so often repeat the words of other characters. Joyce gives much attention and detail to how spoken discourse can influence the inner lives of his characters from the opening short story of Dubliners to the final page of his last work, Finnegans Wake. As opposed to an intertextual reading that would look for other texts influencing Joyce’s work, this book is marked by intratextual readings: Readings in which the repetition of utterances made by Joyce’s characters are read together within his own works. Drawing from such notable figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze for its theoretical foundations of transmission, Resonant Utterances offers a critical insight into how the discourse of many Joycean characters is dialogically sourced. Appreciating the relationship between Joyce’s texts and everyday experience, this book likewise links the two and contextualizes its fictional findings with our own everyday experiences of using language. Where do our words come from? Why does it matter that our words are often borrowed from other speakers? Resonant Utterances offers both literary and philosophical answers.