Chris Eagle on the Wake

Chris Eagle, a member of our reading group, will be presenting a paper, '"Creative Stuttering": On Speech Pathology in Deleuze and Joyce', on Wednesday 5 October from 11 to 12:30. This fits in perfectly with our next meeting, which begins at 1pm.

Abstract and details are below.

The Writing and Society Research Group

at the University of Western Sydney

is pleased to present

Chris Eagle

on “Creative Stuttering” : On Speech Pathology in Deleuze and Joyce’

Wednesday 5 October

11.00am-12.30pm

Building 1.1.119, Bankstown campus, Bullecourt Ave, Milperra

via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5

In his essay “He Stuttered,” Gilles Deleuze lays out three different possibilities for the incorporation of stuttering effects into literary works.  The first is to transcribe stuttered speech directly into the text.  The second is to describe the stutter without actually transcribing it.  With the third possibility, what Deleuze calls “creative stuttering,” the writer need not portray a stuttering character at all since “it is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language.”  As examples of this final and more radical possibility, Deleuze cites the styles of writers like Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, and Melville, among others.  It is safe to say that James Joyce's name is conspicuous in its absence from Deleuze's list of creative stutterers, and in this talk, I will address the extent to which Deleuze's three categories apply to Finnegans Wake.  My discussion of Finnegans Wake will focus primarily on those two scenes in which stuttering is foregrounded, the well-known Cad scene from Book I (pp. 35-36) and the Inquest scene from Book III (pp. 532-534).