Beyond the Word : : Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication / / Donald E. Theall.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Theall, Donald E.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©1995
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Heritage
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

Beyond the Word challenges the reader to reconsider the role of artistic expression as cultural production within today’s society, and questions many key aspects of contemporary critical thought. Donald Theall centres his discussion around the theoretical implication of the work of James Joyce, who he posits as ‘poetical engineer’ whose works show how poetry and art have always provided society with a means of communication about societal and technological change. Today’s artist, as exemplified by Joyce, explores a myriad of possibilities for communication in a new world of technology, electrification, and mechanization, by developing a multimedia language that is simultaneously oral, graphic, and polysemic. This causes an ‘unbinding of textuality,’ freeing the concept of text from its original connections with manuscripts and books, and leading so the total involvement of multimedia virtual reality. Beyond the Word provides an implicit critique of postmodernism, redefining it as a further radical stage of modernism. Theall argues that Joyce anticipated many of the insights of semiotics, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. Moreover, Joyce and other modern artists differed from their predecessors in exhibiting a greater sense of their place within a dynamic, multifaceted field of communication. Thus, long before the emergence of postmodernism, these radical modernists posed an implicit challenged to the traditional notion of art as a privileged sphere. Beyond the Word situates artistic expression within a broad ecology of communication alongside genres such as comics, games, ads, videos, and slogans of spontaneous protest. Within this context, Theall reconsiders the contributions of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Gregory Bateson, and Kenneth Burke to our contemporary understanding of communication, and looks at artists as disparate as Dusan Makavejev, Stanley Kubrick, Alexander Pope, Rabelais, William Gibson, Gene Roddenberry, and Wyndham Lewis.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- A Note on Acronyms and Reference Style -- 1. The Poetic Body in the New Culture of Time and Space: Communication, Art, and Technology in the Twentieth Century -- 2. The Micro as the Medium and the Message: Synaesthesia, the Harmonization of the Senses, and the Mechanics of Art -- 3. From Sense to Nonsense: Gesture, the Body, and Communication -- 4. The Joyce Era: Modernity and Poetics -- 5. The Book, the Press, Eisenstein, and Joyce: Changing Relations in Culture, Technology, and Communication -- 6. Beyond Media -- 7. The Comic, Wit, and Laughter: Dramatic Engineering of Communication -- 8. A Dramatic Theory of Communication -- 9. Communication and Comedy: Negativity, Satire, and Secular Communion -- 10. Tactility and the lntersensory: Body, Dance, and Communication -- 11. Electro-Mechanization and the Global City: Poetic Engineering and the Open Text -- 12. Memory: The Crux of Communication -- 13. History of the Poetic: A Major Aspect of the History of Communication -- 14. High Decibel Dialogue of the Electronic Fairground: Mediating Communication by Talking about It -- 15. The Ambivalence of the Poetic as Critique: Science Fiction and Fellini Films -- 16. Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index