Abstract

Defining the Cinematic: An Understanding of Joyce's "Wandering Rocks" as a Cinematic Text


Media, in all its incarnations throughout the past century, has led many scholars to questions concerning the modes and methods of media production.  However, within this period of study scholars have sought to understand how and when adaptation from one medium to another is not only produced but the intricacies that allow that production to function.  While this is an interesting and relevant line of study for many fields in cultural and humanitarian scholarship, this paper will deal with the function of a written text as film-like.  Many scholars of the Frankfurt school, including Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and the mid 20^th century French philosophical movement, Deluze and Guattari, have previously explored the manufacture and fundamental problems of the creation of a media text in this century.  However, they have not delved into how a written text, such as a novel, portrays film-like features and how those features either succeed or fail as a text.  This paper will focus on James Joyce’s the “Wandering Rocks,” a chapter within Ulysses, and will enunciate how and when Joyce adapts cinematic features, such as script, movement, dialogue, and camera focus, to his texts.  Can a text be a remediation  of film and if it is a reader reading into it or not?  This explication will focus on understanding how to correctly read a written text as cinematic and whether a writer can in fact properly manufacture the same features evident in a film within their written texts.