Maria Kager

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at Utrecht University

This article reflects on the relation between Fritz Mauthner and James Joyce, of whom we know that he read Mauthner's Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache and quotes sections of it in his monumental last work, Finnegans Wake. It will focus on the complex multilingual environments in which Joyce and Mauthner grew up and consider the ways in which th...

James Joyce’s Ulysses has been notorious as a “dirty book” from the moment of its appearance. It was banned on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for its supposed obscenity and even Joyce’s experimental peers were shocked by its indecent language. Yet Joyce’s earlier works, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are almost completely...

Critics tend to view the subversive use of English in Ulysses and, especially, Finnegans Wake, mainly in relation to Joyce's political ideas about Ireland's colonial history. Notwithstanding the political aspects of Joyce's relationship with the English language, this paper argues that it has an important linguistic component as well. Drawing on re...

Raised in an Anglophile family, Nabokov read English before he read Russian and called himself a “bilingual baby.” Yet he has described his “Conradical” switch, from writing in Russian to writing in English, as a loss that was “exceedingly painful—like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.” Nabokov cent...

Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman's important volume on Beckett's international reception is the latest in the Continuum Reception Studies series. The essays in this collection trace Beckett's reception in a number of European countries, and in some non-European ones, and reaffirm Beckett's status as a formidable force in twentieth-century writing acr...

Sarah West's study is an informative and well-written exploration of the performative voice in Beckett's plays. It charts the process by which, from the late fifties onwards, the performative voice determines the drama in Beckett's plays and pays attention both to dramatic speech and to technical aspects of sound reproduction. Although disappointin...

Neither James Joyce nor Franz Kafka was able to regard his native language as completely his own, yet neither chose to write in an alternative one. Instead, they attacked language as they wrote—an assault that both authors conducted by including foreign languages: Yiddish in the case of Kafka; Irish, Italian, Latin, and myriad others in the case of...