James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film

Book at Lunchtime, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film James
Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film reappraises the lines of
influence said to exist between Joyce's writing and early cinema
and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of
Joyce and film. Through a compelling combination of historical
research and critical analysis, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley demonstrates
that Joyce, early film-makers, and phenomenologists (Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, in particular) share a common enterprise: all are
concerned with showing, rather than explaining, the 'inherence of
the self in the world'. Instead of portraying an objective, neutral
world, bereft of human input, Joyce, the film-makers, and the
phenomenologists present embodied, conscious engagement with the
environment and others: they are interested in the
world-as-it-is-lived and transcend the seemingly-rigid binaries of
seer/seen, subject/object, absorptive/theatrical, and
personal/impersonal. This book re-evaluates the history of body-
and spectator-focused film theories, placing Merleau-Ponty at the
centre of the discussion, and considers the ways in which Joyce may
have encountered such theories. In a wealth of close analyses,
Joyce's fiction is read alongside the work of early film-makers
such as Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès, and Mitchell and Kenyon,
and in relation to the philosophical dimensions of early-cinematic
devices such as the Mutoscope, the stereoscope, and the panorama.
By putting Joyce's literary work—Ulysses above all—into dialogue
with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and
enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.