(See also Gap Dance elsewhere in this journal.)
"… the Wake seemed to be everywhere
at the Utrecht Joyce Symposium."
"What I saw at the Symposium at Utrecht
were scholars working to close the gap
between the multifaceted complexity
of the text and the vastly greater complexity
of the readers experiencing it."
— "Along the Krommerun: The Twenty-Fourth International
James Joyce Symposium, Utrecht, The Netherlands,
15-20 June 2014," by Andrew Ferguson, University of Virginia.
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"Central to these structural and aesthetic innovations, however, is a mundane element: the wooden dowel. The dowel is a small peg of variable length; its ends lack distinct heads, allowing it work in any direction. The dowels remain hidden in the Red Blue Chair as they connect rail to rail and rail to plank, invisible yet essential to the chair's appearance and its defiance of convention and gravity. Critics have noted the chair's flouting of the rules of modern architectural semantics: Yves-Alain Bois writes of the elements that function simultaneously in two ways, as both supporting prop and supported cantilever, as subverting "the functionalist ethic of modernist architecture — the dictum that would have one meaning per sign". It is the dowel that allows the elements of the chair to attain so subtly this semantic complexity. The chair's innovations are not technological, but rather concern the arrangement and deployment of existing materials and elements. The dowel is a modest but highly adaptable means of joining: while the dovetail joint requires two equally sized components, the mortise and tenon involves a male and a female element, and the housed joint requires an extended zone of contact, the dowel neutrally connects all kinds of elements to one another, its single point allowing maximum freedom in the orientation of the connected elements." — Page 25 of "From Dowel to Tesseract," |