`Creation from nothing': a foregrounding study of James Joyce's drafts for Ulysses

Abstract

In May 2002, previously unknown early drafts of what was to become the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses surfaced. Joyce worked these drafts into the manuscript that is now known as the `V.A.3-Buffalo' manuscript, in its turn the antecedent of the fair copy forming part of the so-called Rosenbach manuscript on which the published Gabler edition of Ulysses is based. In the study presented in this article, I chose three passages from the earliest drafts and found their corresponding passages in the V.A.3-Buffalo manuscript, and the published text (amounting to a total of nine text passages). In both manuscripts the first layer (before revisions) was chosen, to have the greatest possible difference between versions. After dividing the texts into roughly sentence-length segments, I conducted a foregrounding analysis on all segments of the nine texts and quantified the foregrounding devices. The objective of the presented study was to investigate whether results of past empirical studies of foregrounding, which have concentrated on poems or fairly straightforward narratives would hold true for such complex texts as James Joyce's Ulysses. To measure reader responses to the foregrounding of the texts, ratings on strikingness and affect, as well as reading times per segment were recorded. These responses proved to correlate significantly with the numerical foregrounding index per segment. Additionally, a salient framework is proposed for the study of manuscript materials.