Abstract
As a child growing up in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century, James Joyce was captivated by popular forms of entertainment: song, pantomime, vaudeville comedy, slapstick humor, theatrical melodrama, and penny-paper romance. Cheryl Herr, in Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, and Brandon Kershner, in Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture, have offered salient assessments of the impact of popular Victorian art forms on Joyce's modernist sensibility. In the 1970's, Lorraine Weir called attention to Joyce's avid interest in Marcel Jousse's "evangelical pantomimes" on view in Paris in the late 1920's. In Gestural Politics, Christy L. Burns has resuscitated Jousse's Christological notion of gestural meaning, amalgamated with Jacques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics and influences of Dublin street mime and music, to reveal a passionate political aesthetic at the heart of Joyce's avant-garde experimentation. Turning to Jousse as a formative influence on the Wake's radical progress, Burns shows how Joyce's most farraginous text defies critical archetypologies suggested by Plato's eidos, Brunonian contraries, Viconian imperialistic historigraphy, Jungian archetypes, and traditional characterology.
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