The 'Baroque Weaving Machine': Contrasting Counterpoint in James Joyce and Anthony Burgess
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19298846
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1057/9781137503626_8
- Book title
- Joycean Legacies
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 978-1-137-50362-6
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter is part of a collection that seeks to analyse the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century. It has been influential in Joyce studies in Britain, Ireland, and internationally.
The research presented here is a reading of the intersection of music and prose in Joyce and Burgess through the figure of counterpoint, juxtaposing Joyce's experimentation with that of Anthony Burgess's disruptive contrapuntal 'zapping' technique.
Burgess was prominent in Joycean circles for his extensive efforts to popularize a writer who had influenced his own work profoundly. In fact, he came to define his own early career as that of ‘a sub Joycean novelist’ whose early novels bear the tell-tale marks of an almost adversarial relationship with the Irish writer. Joycean influence can even be discerned in the linguistic pyrotechnics of Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange (1960), demonstrably derived as they are from Joyce’s own portmanteau paranomasia in Finnegans Wake (1939). The chapter puts counterpoint in literature into its musical context and charts its use by both authors. It demonstrates how Burgess’s compound methodology was so reliant upon this debt to Joyce, and how Burgess’ success in the form was both a literary and existential triumph.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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