Doubtful Points (Joyce and Punctuation)

As unusual or esoteric as the subject might seem, Joyce’s punctuation offers a way to study and appreciate his stylistic innovations and the materiality of his textual productions. Joyce’s shunning of what he called “perverted commas” and the general absence of punctuation in Molly Bloom’s monologue are only the most infamous instances of a deeply idiosyncratic and changeable use of punctuation. The essays collected in Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation investigate ellipses, parentheses, commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons, full stops, and even diacritics to explore a surprising array of contingent subjects: Joyce’s working relationships with publishers; questions of editing and translation; hermeneutic and epistemological dilemmas and reading strategies; linguistic nationalisms; the ideological effects of regulated writing; and more. This book is sure to edify and intrigue “fullstoppers” and “semicolonials” alike.