Abstract:

The essay interrogates the specific attention that James Joyce pays to skin as a permeable threshold between the human and the non-human in Finnegans Wake. This approach relocates from symbolic, archetypal, and aesthetic considerations of nonhuman animals and environments in the Wake to focus on both the physical materiality and diverse discursive constructions of “skin” as a liminal surface that cleaves and fuses the human and the nonhuman on biological, cultural, technological, phenomenological grounds. Drawing together distinct debates in Joyce studies about the significance of skin and animality to his poetics, the essay’s argument proceeds in four interrelated movements. First, it establishes an arc in Joyce’s aesthetic project from an early association of the skin with human sensation in his 1912 essay “L’influenza letteraria universale del rinascimento” to the Wake’s deanthropomorphized engagement with the material histories of nonhuman skins in human cultural production. Second, it examines how the “Shem the Penman” episode stages these histories through Shem’s transformed and transforming skin, which figures the forger-artist as a non/human assemblage. Third, it shows how Joyce foregrounds the exploitation of nonhuman bodies in the technologies and semiotics of clothing through scenes of sartorial ostranenie in Biblical, colonial, and ecofeminist contexts. In closing, it is argued that the recurrence of nonhuman skins in spectral, funerary, and ecological scenes demonstrates a Wakean principle of becoming that is “limitrophic” in the sense later employed by Jacques Derrida. Along the way, intertextual allusions to literary scenes of nonhuman skin are identified (from Jacob and Esau, medieval religious poetry, and “Bryan O’Lynn” to Jonathan Swift, Honoré de Balzac, and Oscar Wilde) to situate the Wake in a lineage of texts that foregrounds and thematizes an awareness of the commodification of the nonhuman in human cultural production. In sum, the essay develops the claim that as an unstable threshold of the human and the nonhuman, skin is neither rigidly fixed nor wholly effaced in Joyce’s work. The Wake is thus reframed as a prominent instance of “ecological modernism” in which the material and conceptual epidermal limits of the non/human are continuously transgressed, multiplied, redrawn.

摘要：

这篇文章询问了詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）对皮肤的特殊关注，这是《芬尼根斯苏醒》中人与非人之间的可渗透阈值。该方法从《唤醒》中非人类动物和环境的象征，原型和美学考虑重新定位专注于物理上的实质性和“皮肤”的不同话语结构，作为在生物学，文化，技术，现象学基础上分裂和融合人类和非人类的门槛表面。在乔伊斯的研究中，关于皮肤和动物性对他的诗学的重要性的不同辩论汇集在一起​​，这篇论文的论点来自四个相互关联的运动。首先，它在乔伊斯（Joyce）的美学计划中树立了弧线，从皮肤与人的感觉的早期关联在他1912年的论文“ L'influenza letteraria Universale del rinascimento”到《唤醒》（Wake）在人类文化生产中非人类化与非人类皮肤的物质历史的互动。其次，它研究了“ Shem the Penman”情节如何通过Shem转变后的皮肤转变这些历史，后者将伪造艺术家视为一种非人类的集合体。第三，它显示了乔伊斯如何通过圣经，殖民地和生态女权主义背景下的裁缝大屠杀场景来展望服装技术和符号学领域对非人体的剥削。最后，有人争辩说，非人类皮肤在光谱，丧葬和生态场景中的复发证明了Wakean的变身原理，在后来雅克·德里达（Jacques Derrida）所采用的意义上，这是“有限的”。在此过程中，人们发现了对非人类皮肤文学场景的互文暗示（来自Jacob和Esau，在一系列文字中醒来，这些文字突出并主题化了人类文化生产中非人类商品化的意识。总之，本文提出了这样的主张，即作为人类和非人类的不稳定阈值，乔伊斯的作品既没有严格固定皮肤，也没有完全消除皮肤。因此，唤醒被重新构架为“生态现代主义”的一个突出实例，在该实例中，非人类的物质和表皮极限不断地被超越，繁殖，重画。