当前位置: X-MOL 学术James Joyce Quarterly › 论文详情
Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
"Beard and Bicycle": The Human, Nonhuman, and Posthuman Bicyclist in Ulysses
James Joyce Quarterly ( IF 0.1 ) Pub Date : 2021-03-02 , DOI: 10.1353/jjq.2020.0036
James Alexander Fraser

Abstract:

Born just a few years before the invention of the “safety bicycle” (1885) and coming to consciousness amidst the “second bicycle boom,” it is perhaps unsurprising that bicycles reappear throughout Joyce’s works. By 1904, as Ulysses carefully documents, the initial excitement of the boom had largely given way to a period of sober ubiquity as other, more spectacular technologies competed for the future. Yet the bicycle remains a vital source of philosophical and social inquiry. Joyce emphasizes, for example, the technology’s connection with developing and shifting sexual economies (for instance, Reggie Wylie and Gerty MacDowell, Milly Bloom, and others) and in particular with contemporary preoccupations with the notion of the “New Woman” and the gender-bending “rational dress.” But through its connection with the poet and spiritualist George Russell (“Æ”), the bicycle is also brought into a complex conversation about “vegetarianism,” Irish spiritualism, and the cyclist as caught between contradictory animal and post-bodily technological states. I propose to engage the emerging theoretical frameworks of the “non-human turn” to explore the role of the bicycle in Joyce’s efforts to examine the connections between the human and the nonhuman and his efforts to decenter human agency and undermine rationalist, progressivist conceptions of the relationship between human, technology, and nature. As recent work seeks to emphasize (including the “Animal Machines/Machine Animals” conference in Exeter in November), the development of machines affects conceptions about the animal. But in Joyce, there is a feedback loop in which human, machine, and animal are all found to be (often chaotically and irresolvably) interrelated and all defined against competing notions of the “post-human” and the “fully human.”

Notably, Bloom expresses his displeasure at the sight of a “[d]amn bad ad” that figures the cyclist bent over “like a cod in a pot”; the ad, he reasons, should instead be perfectly “round like a wheel” (U 5.552, 552–53). To put it another way, Bloom wishes to replace the ungainly, embodied, animal cyclist with the smooth, rational machine; the organism dead or on the brink of death with the perfect, timeless mechanism. But the text of Ulysses also resists and undermines Bloom’s emphasis. Bloom is himself assaulted by irrational bicycles and bicyclists in “Circe” where he is also confronted by a monstrous vision of a hybrid Æ/Mananaun MacLir. The “bearded figure,” apparently no longer vegetarian, “smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand” and in so doing uses cycling paraphernalia to insert an animal physicality into Æ’s more abstract, Gaelic spirituality. I propose to place Joyce’s depiction of the bicycle in the context of specific contemporary debates over the status of the bicycle as technological/spiritual, modern/anachronistic, and abstract/bodily. This in turn will allow me to produce a complex picture of the bicyclist in Joyce as caught between the human, nonhuman, and the post-human.



中文翻译:

“胡子和自行车”:尤利西斯的人类,非人类和后人类自行车手

摘要:

诞生于“安全自行车”(1885年)诞生的前几年,并在“第二次自行车热潮”中引起人们的注意,自行车在乔伊斯的整个作品中重新出现也许不足为奇。到1904年,如《尤利西斯》仔细记录一下,繁荣的最初兴奋在很大程度上被一段清醒的普遍性所取代,因为其他更引人注目的技术也在争夺未来。然而,自行车仍然是哲学和社会探索的重要来源。例如,乔伊斯(Joyce)强调了该技术与发展中的和不断变化的性经济(例如Reggie Wylie和Gerty MacDowell,Milly Bloom等)的联系,特别是与当代人们对“新女性”和性别观念的关注有关。弯曲“理性的衣服”。但是通过与诗人和唯心论者乔治·罗素(George Russell,“Æ”)的联系,自行车也陷入了关于“素食主义”,爱尔兰唯心主义和骑自行车者的复杂对话,陷入了矛盾的动物状态与后身体技术状态之间。我建议参与新兴的“非人类转向”的理论框架,以探讨自行车在乔伊斯努力研究人类与非人类之间的联系以及使人类代理权偏心并破坏理性主义,进步主义观念的努力中的作用。人,技术和自然之间的关系。正如最近的工作试图强调的那样(包括11月在埃克塞特举行的“动物机器/机器动物”会议),机器的发展影响了有关动物的概念。但是在乔伊斯(Joyce)中,存在一个反馈循环,其中发现人类,机器和动物都是(通常是混乱且无法解决的)相互关联的,并且都与“后人类”和“完全人类”的相互竞争的概念进行了定义。机器的发展影响着有关动物的观念。但是在乔伊斯(Joyce)中,存在一个反馈循环,其中发现人类,机器和动物都是(通常是混乱且无法解决的)相互关联的,并且都与“后人类”和“完全人类”的相互竞争的概念进行了定义。机器的发展影响着有关动物的观念。但是在乔伊斯(Joyce)中,存在一个反馈循环,其中发现人类,机器和动物都是(通常是混乱且无法解决的)相互关联的,并且都与“后人类”和“完全人类”的相互竞争的概念进行了定义。

值得注意的是,布鲁姆(Bloom)对看到“ [d] amn不好的广告”一词表示不满,该广告显示骑车人“像罐子里的鳕鱼”弯腰弯腰。他认为,广告应该完美地“像轮子一样圆”(U 5.552、552-53)。换句话说,布卢姆希望用流畅,合理的机器代替笨拙,具体化的动物自行车手。具有完美,永恒机制的生物死亡或濒临死亡。但是《尤利西斯》的文字还抵制并破坏了Bloom的强调。布鲁姆本人在“马戏团”(Circe)中遭到不合理的自行车和自行车手的殴打,在那里他还面临着混合of / Mananaun MacLir的奇异异象。这个“大胡子的人”,显然不再是素食者,“用他的自行车打着左手小龙虾的脚,”,这样就用骑自行车的用具将动物的身体插入了Æ更抽象的盖尔灵性中。我建议将乔伊斯对自行车的描述放在关于自行车作为技术/精神,现代/过时,抽象/身体的地位的特定当代辩论的背景下。反过来,这将使我能够描绘出乔伊斯的一名骑自行车的人在人类,非人类和后人类之间的复杂图画。

更新日期:2021-03-16
down
wechat
bug