James Joyce and Photography

This thesis examines the relationship between photography and paralysis in the work of James Joyce. In taking Joyce’s intention to ‘betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’ as key to his engagement with photography, I argue that the photographic images in Joyce’s work occupy a shifting, intermediary position between the stasis of portraiture and the kinesis of film (LI 55). Garry Leonard, Louise E. J. Hornby and Eloise Knowlton have begun to address the interdisciplinary relationship between photography and literature in the work of James Joyce, but their writing considers individual texts, rather than Joyce’s work as a whole. Studies of the history of Irish photographic culture have been similarly absent, with Justin Carville and Kevin and Emer Rockett’s monographs on Ireland and photography appearing only in the last decade. This project builds on this recent scholarship and, by reading Joyce’s allusions to photography through a historical and theoretical lens, provides a new and in-depth approach to Joycean study.