James Joyce; or, The Imitation Machine
Joyce Studies Annual announces the publication of a special issue for 2025 on "Networks of Transnationality," guest edited by Shinjini Chattopadhyay.
Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) capable of producing humanlike language have renewed longstanding questions about the relationship between machines, literary production, and interpretation. Yet such questions are hardly new. James Joyce and his works have long occupied a central place in debates about language, imitation, and mechanical reproduction.
In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce famously blurred the boundaries between writing and engineering, describing himself as “really one of the great engineers, if not the greatest, in the world.” Linguists, mathematicians, and theorists have since turned to Joyce’s writing to advance their own ideas. George Kingsley Zipf demonstrated that his law of word frequency applied to literature by counting every word in Ulysses. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver cited Finnegans Wake as a premier example of linguistic complexity in The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Literary scholars have likewise emphasized Joyce’s computational dimensions: Jacques Derrida described the Joyce text as a “hundredth-generation computer,” while Lydia Liu has argued that Joyce anticipated a digital conception of language as probabilistic series rather than syntactic arrangements of meaning.
Today, as scholarship in posthumanism, media theory, and the digital humanities continues to expand, engagements with Joyce and machine culture remain as vital as ever. This special cluster seeks to bring new work into dialogue with Joyce studies and to revisit enduring questions in light of contemporary developments that challenge established literary and humanistic categories.
Call for Papers (2027)
Under the broad heading “James Joyce; or, The Imitation Machine,” we welcome proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
-
*Joyce’s imitations of other writers and the reciprocal relationship between literary and mechanical production
-
*Joyce’s translations—and translations of Joyce—in relation to machine translation, fidelity, and transformation
-
*Inference and interpretation in Joyce’s works: how characters and readers reason, and how such processes compare to forms of artificial “intelligence”
-
*Measurement, quantification, and data in Joyce’s writing, including digital and scientific approaches to his texts
-
*The entanglement of race, class, and gender with representations of machines in Joyce
-
*Joyce’s treatment of coloniality in relation to machine culture and technological modernity
Submission Guidelines
Please submit a single PDF containing:
-
A brief scholarly bio (approximately 100 words)
-
An abstract of 250–300 words
Submissions should be sent to Jeewon Yoo (jy3@williams.edu) and Chris GoGwilt (gogwilt@fordham.edu) by March 1, 2026.
Notification of abstract decisions will be sent by May 1, 2026.
Completed articles of 7,000–9,000 words will be due by August 31, 2026.
Final essays will be subject to peer review prior to publication.
