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Reviewed by:
  • Hypermedia Joyce edited by Louis Armand and David Vichnar
  • Mike Frangos (bio)
Hypermedia Joyce, edited by Louis Armand and David Vichnar. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010. 196 pp. €12.00.

The fourteen articles compiled in Hypermedia Joyce appeared originally online in Hypermedia Joyce Studies (HJS) between 1995—the journal’s first issue—and 2007. The collection commemorates the tenth volume of HJS and provides a rich set of source texts for reflecting on the early enthusiasm about hypertext in Joyce studies. In his introduction, David Vichnar usefully situates the earliest of the volume’s articles against the context of Joycean work on hypertext in the early 1990s. Projects such as Donald Theall’s online versions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Fritz Senn and the Zurich Joyce Foundation’s HyperWake, and Michael Groden’s Digital “Ulysses,” seemed to demonstrate the necessity of taking hypertext seriously in Joycean criticism, particularly during the three-year window between 1990 and 1993 when Joyce’s works were in the public domain.1 One of the goals of Hypermedia Joyce is evidently a renewal of interest in precisely these “long-abandoned projects that saw the light of day in that brief period between 1990 and 1993” (16). After the re-entry of some of Joyce’s writing into the public domain in 2012, reflection on the early possibilities of hypertext is especially welcome, particularly when excitement about digital humanities has done even more to intensify interest in computational approaches. Hypermedia Joyce thus provides a useful resource both for Joyceans interested in the digital arena as well as for scholars of the historical moment of hypertext.

Vichnar also describes in his introduction the move books make in “regress[ing] from hypertext to text by putting back into the print medium texts originally conceived and written to be viewed on the computer screen” (16). A brief look at the online versions of articles [End Page 695] by Theall and Darren Tofts from HJS’s inaugural 1995 issue reveals the jarring effect of translating the essays from hypertext to text.2 Hypermedia Joyce makes no attempt to capture the playful hyperlinking between sections employed in these articles (especially Tofts’s “Where are we at all? And whenabouts in the name of space?”), which is unfortunate, given that the book purports to draw attention to the very enthusiasm around Joyce and hypertext captured in these articles. Fortunately, the contributions to HJS after 2002 follow the conventions of scholarly writing more closely and thus pose no particular problems for reproduction in Hypermedia Joyce. Another necessary limitation of the collection is the selection of articles for inclusion, which naturally excludes many studies that would have otherwise been excellent candidates for republication. Theoretical texts on hypertext could have been complemented by articles from HJS’s archive that take more direct approaches to reading Joyce through digital methods, such as McKenzie Wark’s essay on code-work, Groden’s discussion of annotation in Digital “Ulysses,” and Ian Gunn and Mark Wright’s brilliant work with data visualization and spatial analysis.3 Inclusion of such additional articles might have provided a slightly richer set of references for rethinking Joyce through digital methods. As it stands, the volume’s discussion of computational approaches is confined mostly to speculative descriptions, such as Theall’s imagining a possible “online networked Finnegans Wake consisting of a multitude of international nodes” that “will be generating itself in the next century” (49)!

The characteristic reading of Joyce that emerges in the first half of the collection sees the monumental modernist as one of the first cyberpunks, a “‘prophetic’” writer (as Theall calls him repeatedly in the first issue of HJS) whose work sets the scene for late-twentieth-century techno-futuristic depictions of cyberspace (21). These articles include the complete set of contributions to HJS by Theall and Tofts—four by the former critic and two by the latter—which nicely complement each other in making a case for Joyce’s work as an important moment in what Theall terms, in the title of one of his articles, “the [p]re-[h]istory of [c]yberspace” (17). For both Theall and Tofts, the line between Joyce and William Gibson, who...

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