James Joyce, Or The Imitation Machine
The development of Large Language Models (LLM) that can output language resembling human-made work have reinvigorated questions regarding the machine in literary production and scholarship.
James Joyce and his works have been part of this discussion for a long time. In a letter to Harriet Weaver Shaw, Joyce blurred the boundaries between writing and building, claiming he was “really one of the great engineers, if not the greatest, in the world.” Linguists and mathematicians have since then turned to Joyce’s works to advance their own ideas. George Kingsley Zipf showed that his rule about word frequency applies to literature as well by counting every word in Ulysses. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver cite Finnegans Wake as a premier example of linguistic complexity in The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Literary scholars have weighed in as well. Jacques Derrida called the Joyce text a “100th-generation computer.” Lydia Liu has suggested that Joyce anticipated the digital conception of language as a probable series of meaningless letters rather than a syntactic combination of semantic units.
Today, from scholarship in posthumanism to the digital humanities, engagements with Joyce and machine culture remain vibrant as ever. This special cluster of Joyce Studies Annual seeks to showcase ongoing work, bring new scholarship in dialogue with Joyce studies, and to pose enduring questions anew in light of developments that have led us to rethink literary and humanistic categories. Under the broad heading of “James Joyce; or, The Imitation Machine,” we welcome proposals on topics such as, but not limited to:
- How can our understanding of literary and mechanical production be thought through Joyce’s imitations of other writers and vice versa?
- How do Joyce’s translations and translations of Joyce speak to practices of machine translation? How does the idea of fidelity apply across translations and relationships?
- How do characters make inferences in Joyce? What sorts of inferences do readers make in reading Joyce? How are these inferences like or unlike the “intelligence” of AI?
- How do Joyce’s works measure and quantify the world? How have Joyce’s works been analyzed by digital scholarship in the humanities and the sciences?
- How does Joyce entwine the representation of race/class/gender with that of the machine?
- How does Joyce connect coloniality and machine culture?
Please send a brief scholarly bio (100 words) and an abstract (250–300 words) combined in a single PDF to Jeewon Yoo [email protected] and Chris GoGwilt [email protected] by March 1, 2026.
Decisions about abstracts sent by May 1, 2026. Full-length articles (7,000–9,000 words) will be due by August 31, 2026.
Final essays will be accepted for publication through peer review.