ABSTRACT

In one of her least pejorative references to Joyce, Christine Brooke-Rose cites him as an example of a writer who shares with philologists a ‘dotty’ passion for the history of language. Coming in the middle of her students’ guide to Ezra Pound, this claim assigns linguistic sentiments to Joyce that Brooke-Rose would go on to express herself. In an interview nearly five years later, she describes a ‘passionate concern with language’ that borders on ‘the feeling of the sacred’: ‘I’ve always had it. I studied philology’. This essay unearths a vein of Joycean philological imaginings in Brooke-Rose's work that seeks to intertwine the textual and the biological, evoking a ‘sensuous' script from a mythical prehistory. Focusing on Between (1968), I trace an intricate ambivalence over the relationship between sign and matter that ultimately feeds into Brooke-Rose's attitudes towards poststructuralism, gender, and language as a whole. Hovering between the sacred and the profane, the dotty and the down-to-earth, these imaginings also serve to draw out the latent continuities between the ancient hunt for a motivated script and the contemporary search for semiosis in nature; between Babel and biosemiotics.

摘要

在她对乔伊斯的最不贬义的引用之一中，克里斯汀布鲁克罗斯引用他作为一个作家的例子，他与语言学家分享了对语言历史的“愚蠢”热情。在她的学生以斯拉庞德指南的中间，这种说法将语言情感分配给乔伊斯，布鲁克-罗斯将继续表达自己。在近五年后的一次采访中，她描述了一种接近于“神圣感”的“对语言的热情关注”：“我一直都有。我学过语言学”。这篇文章在布鲁克-罗斯的作品中挖掘出乔伊斯的语言学想象的脉络，试图将文本和生物学交织在一起，唤起神话史前史的“感性”剧本。专注于之间（1968 年），我追溯了符号与物质之间关系的错综复杂的矛盾心理，这种矛盾心理最终形成了布鲁克-罗斯对后结构主义、性别和整体语言的态度。这些想象徘徊在神圣与世俗、愚蠢与朴实之间，也有助于勾勒出古代对有动机的剧本的追寻与当代对自然符号学的探索之间潜在的连续性。在巴别塔和生物符号学之间。