Hoaxville: Reading Perec Reading Joyce

This essay explores Georges Perec's lifelong admiration for Joyce's literary innovations and uncovers the important role it played in the elaboration of his own ludic and highly formal aesthetic. Having situated the author in the context of various avant-gardist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the essay scrutinizes the specific uses to which Joycean quotations are put in Life A User's Manual, Perec's masterpiece of 1978. Analyzing the minutiae of his adapted borrowings from Ulysses, it sheds light on the parallels and differences between their extensive intertextualities.