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Modernism and the Encyclopedia by James Blackwell Phelan

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The Literature of Information Overload: Modernism and the Encyclopedia By James Blackwell Phelan Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 10, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Mark Wollaeger, Ph.D. Scott Juengel, Ph.D. Rachel Teukolsky, Ph.D. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Ph.D. For Mike il migliore fratello. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The debts of gratitude I have amassed on the way to completing this dissertation are immense, extravagant, unrepayable. I can only keep thanking and thanking everyone whose generosity has contributed to my incredible good fortune. (The word generosity may recur here. What quality matters more in this profession?) I am sure to leave out someone important, and if that’s you, please excuse my forgetfulness and know that I appreciate all you have done for me. From the time I assembled it, my dissertation committee has been surpassingly great to work with. I can be pretty smug about that, nodding along sympathetically to the hair-raising tales of committee discord and dysfunction that are shared wherever grad students are drinking at a conference. If it’s a modernism conference, I may not need to say more than “I work with Mark Wollaeger” to collect a round of looks that read: You lucky bastard. Mark lives up to his reputation. As the mentor, interlocutor, and editor at the center of my graduate career, he has made me a scholar and writer I would never have become without his generosity and the care he has shown my work. Having Scott Juengel on my committee has been a joy. That might sound like hyperbole, coming in a genre that tilts so heavily toward it, but only if you have not spent time talking books and ideas with Scott. His feedback invariably opens my work up to rich possibilities I had never considered and comes italicized with an intellectual exuberance that proves there is no reason deep seriousness cannot be delightful. Similarly, it seems whenever we talk, Rachel Teukolsky has an idea or question that permanently changes my thinking about the point we are discussing. Rachel’s perspicacity is astonishing, and working with her is a huge pleasure. Every committee ought to include a reader from an adjacent field who contributes the sort of defamiliarizing perspective and wealth of insight Rachel does. Paul Saint-Amour has iii been terrifically generous to me since his visit to Vanderbilt my second month here. Even at conferences where his attention is much in demand, he has always found time to discuss my work. He shared chapters of Tense Future in typescript. Every time he has commented on an iteration of this project, he has helped me see it afresh. Did I mention everyone gets along beautifully? My committee is the best. I am immensely grateful to many other people at Vanderbilt. Colin Dayan, Jen Fay, Mark Jarman, Lutz Koepnick, Jonathan Lamb, Leah Marcus, and Helen Shin are among the professors whose teaching and conversation contributed especially much to my graduate career. I have benefited a great deal from the work of everyone who has served or acted as department Chair or Director of Graduate Studies while I have been here, namely: Mark Schoenfeld, Michael Kreyling, and Dana Nelson, and Mark Wollaeger, Vera Kutzinski, and Teresa Goddu. Donna Caplan and Janis May did so much to help me, I could never thank either of them enough. Anna Jones and Jeana Poindexter have been tremendously helpful since they arrived heret. Over my five years at Vanderbilt, I have received a University Graduate Fellowship and two travel grants from the Graduate School, a summer research grant and a Myers Endowment Fund Grant from the English department, and a HASTAC fellowship sponsored by the library, as well as travel scholarships from the Trieste and Dublin James Joyce Schools, the Modernist Studies Association, and the International James Joyce Foundation—all of which helped me to write this dissertation, and for all of which I am grateful. This past year, I was a Robert Penn Warren Center Graduate Student Fellow. Thanks to Mona Frederick, Emma Furman, Terry Tripp, and my cohort of Fellows—Alexandra Alekseyeva, Sarah Koellner, Dani Picard, Rachel Skaggs, Wietske Smeele, and David Vila—this was a valuable experience and a real pleasure. iv I am fortunate to have progressed through the graduate program as part of a particularly brilliant and collegial cohort. Working alongside Joseph Jordan, Amanda Lehr, Kirsten Mendoza, Hashim Khalil Pipkin, Wietske, and Stephanie Straub has been enormous, edifying fun. That is not to forget friends in other years from whom I likewise learned so much and had such a great time—just for starters: Emily August, Kira Braham, Shelby Johnson, Chelsea Land, Lauren Mitchell, Jesse Montgomery, and Don Rodrigues. Mat Bandy was not actually in the program, but he belongs on that list, too. These past two years, I have had the opportunity to edit a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly, “Encyclopedia Joyce,” which will be appearing in 2019. Working on the issue has undoubtedly improved this dissertation. I am thankful to Sean Latham for soliciting the issue; to my co-editor, Kiron Ward, who was a terrific collaborator; and to the contributors who made so much of our call for papers and were so pleasing to work with: Norman Cheadle, Jay Dickson, Keel Geheber, Georgina Nugent-Folan, and Tamara Radak. After exchanging umpteen e-mails and drafts, it was enormously gratifying to get nearly the whole roster together at this year’s International James Joyce Symposium and see long-distance collaboration immediately turn to friendship. Speaking of which: I could not have done this without wonderful friends. Faith Barter’s care and support saw me through the worst of what was, often, a punishing grind to completion. Having her in my life has enriched this work and my time here in innumerable ways. Without having Ariela Freedman as a mentor, I do not suppose I would have any kind of academic career. Her help when I badly needed help was that decisive. Talking about poetry with Chris Gaudet, the years I lived in Vancouver, I learned at least as much I have in any class I’ve taken. Were it not for Harold Hoefle’s influence, as a teacher, then as a friend, I might well be a lawyer v somewhere. The last few years would have been lonelier and a lot less fun without Tracy Monaghan’s friendship. The same goes for the years Sara Strong was here. Saro Setrakian took an interest in this project very early on, before any Ph.D. program would have me, and may be the first person to have read a draft of the paper that was the seed for it. Also, he gave me an extremely useful piece of practical writing advice when I saw him over Christmas. It was difficult to know who to mention in that last paragraph. Coming to study here put a lot of distance between me and most of my friends, and I have not been much good at closing that gap. I want to take a few lines to affirm my love for some people who have been less a part of my life as I have been writing this, but whose friendship nevertheless means the world to me. Marco Barone, Anthony Bider-Hall, Alex Cartier, Adrienne Connelly, Catherine Evans, Sky Goodden, Nina Maness, Padraic Scanlan, Cee Lavery, Yonah Lavery, Samara Leibner, Omar Rahman, Rob Wringham, and any of the dozen or two other friends I could name here: if you happen to read this, know that you are in my heart even if you have not been hearing from me much. Last of all, I owe my deepest gratitude to my family. My parents, Chris Phelan and Linda Blackwell Phelan, have loved and supported me unstintingly my whole life. They have given me more than I can say—here, generosity is too small a word—and, always, they are so much fun. I take strength from how deeply my grandmother, Elizabeth Blackwell, takes my side. She misses me, but her confidence in the work I have traveled far from home to do is intense and unwavering. I know that the whole family—aunts, uncles, cousins, kids—has been cheeering me on through the final stretch, and I dearly appreciate it. As for my brother, Mike Phelan: I began life trying hard to be like him, and I think that what’s best in me, deep down, is whatever stuck. vi LIST OF FIGURES 1. The Complete Larkin and the Collected Eliot ...................................................................... 24 2. The Linati schema as translated in Ulysses: The 1922 Text .................................................. 67 3. The Gilbert schema as transcribed in Ulysses: The 1922 Text .............................................. 69 4. Leslie L. Lewis’s diagram of Finnegans Wake as reproduced in Vision in Motion ............... 70 5. Michael Groden’s “James Joyce’s Ulysses in Hypermedia” prototype in “links highlighted, mouse-click, pop-up” mode ................................................................................................. 71 6. Heyward Erlich’s James Joyce Text Machine in “synchronized multiple annotation” mode ... 71 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................iii LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. vii INTRODUCTION: A FIFTEEN-PAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OR: THE GENRE OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD ..............................................................
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