Elisa Moy

Thesis title: Sculptural Words and their Kinetic Potential in Works of the late 19th Century to Modernism

Supervisor:  Professor Peter Boxall

Research Interests: James Joyce, Kinetic Modernism, Genetic Criticism, New Materialism, Book History, Sculpture, Solidity,

Inscriptional Language, Punctuation.

During my undergraduate and master’s research, I focused my attention on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, genetic criticism, and kinetic modernism, whilst also exploring diverse subjects such as orthographical variation in the Thomas More Manuscript and investigating the authorship of a neglected poem sometimes attributed to Jane Austen. My thesis, funded by the AHRC, Christ Church, and the Clarendon Fund, explores the kinetic possibilities of sculpture, alongside the growing agenda to figure words themselves as sculptural. I am researching the solidity, depth, and closeness of language and rhetoric by applying the term ‘sculpture’ to a range of discrete things: conceptual uses in narrative, both material and kinetic; agglutinative, Joycean word compounds; a figurative approach to genetic criticism as sculptural; and crucially, I rethink a Formalist line of reading text as sculptural, rather than statuesque, urn-like, or monumental.

The broad shape of this research emerges from the sculptural interests of Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Anna Coleman Ladd, Mary Borden, Isaac Rosenberg, H.D., Ezra Pound, Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, braiding together three current fields in scholarship: new materialism, kinetic modernism, and genetic criticism. I am also currently editing Anna Coleman Ladd’s 1926 forgotten play, The Strong.