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Babelian Act of Fecundity: Joyce's Sentimental Information
- James Joyce Quarterly
- The University of Tulsa
- Volume 56, Number 3-4, Spring-Summer 2019
- pp. 349-367
- 10.1353/jjq.2019.0079
- Article
- Additional Information
ABSTRACT:
This essay examines the "sentimental information" of Joyce's Finnegans Wake by considering the "Nuvoletta" episode. As a response to Robert Scholes's recent reprint of Clive Hart's 1967 "James Joyce's Sentimentality," the essay explores the ambient and ambivalent sentimentality of the novel via Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's formulation of information theory. Ultimately, the essay suggests that both Nuvoletta's and the reader's transformation is, to borrow Joyce's word, "motamourfully" successful in the work: both undergo a metamorphosis of the word (mot)—and thus perception—through sentimentality (amour and mournful). By bringing together the unlikely combination of sentimentality and information theory, new ways of reading (and experiencing) the Wake become possible. Rather than a "Babelian act of war," as Jacques Derrida defined the Wake in 1982, this mode of reading produces a Babelian act of fecundity.