Dissertation – “The Einstein of English Fiction”: James Joyce, the New Physics, and Modernist Print Culture – examines the influence of popular accounts of the relativity theories upon arguments about literary form in the British periodicals press and trade book markets. The first chapter surveys the discourse of science in the material culture where Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) emerge, followed by chapters that focus on how the structure and meaning of each work incorporates that discourse, as evidenced in changes to the manuscripts.
I recently presented some of this material for the first time at the 2009 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship at NYU. My presentation analyzed the fair copy manuscript of the “Wandering Rocks” episode (composed Jan-Feb 1919) of Ulysses in order to show evidence that the passages which make the time and space of the narrative the most relativistic were added as marginalia after the main text was composed. This suggests to me that they were conceived as a unit all at the same time. As further material evidence that Joyce might have had physics in mind, I presented a handful of quotes from The Egoist magazine, where he was a contributor, that show an increase in discussion of physics (especially by Dora Marsden), astronomy, the city, and secular power, all of which are themes in “Wandering Rocks.” The presentation was written up and published as an invited article at Genetic Joyce Studies, also forming a portion of the Ulysses chapter of my dissertation.
Ecclesiastical Proust Archive – http://proustarchive.org. A networked resource for a future book-length study of Proust, narrative, and digital media. It consists of a searchable database of all passages on the church motif in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as well as related images and discussion space. Planned developments include TEI markup of all media; text and image annotation tools; realtime visualization tools to generate graphs, maps, and trees of archive content; and a French version of the entire site. The visualization tools, inspired by Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, will be used to perform distant readings of Proust’s text, of the text and associated images, and of differences between a systematic categorization of the novel’s content and nonsystematic reader-generated tags. First version published 25 May 2006. Second version incorporated into a WordPress blog and generally enhanced, 14 December 2006.