MACMILLAN Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature)

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently. Review “Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading, is a bold and remarkable endeavor that aims at making Finnegans Wake readable by tackling squarely its most obvious but also most obfuscating dimension: dense multilingualism. … This book offers a solid scholarly contribution to Joyce and to all these domains, and it will remain on our shelves for a long time.” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Vol. 35 (1), 2021) From the Back Cover 'Alexandrova’s highly original monograph provides a powerful thesis about Joyce’s creative use of languages in Finnegans Wake. Splicing together multilingual poetics with theories of embodiment and lessons gained from translations studies, she shows us how to read the Wake differently, which means really beginning to read it.' -  Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently. About the Author Dr. Boriana Alexandrova is Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK. She has published on Irish modernism, multilingualism, translation, and disability. She works across several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, English, German, and Italian, and her work employs a wide range of methodological approaches from disability theory, the medical humanities, feminist, queer, and cultural theory, phenomenology, trauma studies, and performance. Her work beyond Joyce engages with writers and artists including Eimear McBride, Marlene NourbeSe