Rhetoric and pragmatics in Ulysses: how Joyce invented Twitter

Abstract

Particularly upon their first appearance, Twitter and James Joyce’s unique style had to face similarly infamous charges in that they were both accused of slowly but inexorably corrupting the English language. In fact, the linguistic practices – stylemes in the case of Ulysses – breeding such corruption are often the same: clippings, abbreviations, the dropping out of inflexional endings, omissions, ellipses, the overabundance of acronyms, creative compound words and blends, symbolisations and onomatopoeias, lexicalisations of (often) vernacular pronunciations. This paper sets out to investigate these features, their rhetorical effect and pragmatic function in order to explore the epistemological, perceptive and social context which made it possible a hundred years ago for an Irish modernist to anticipate how English was to be used on today’s social media and on Twitter in particular.