James Joyce Quarterly

As we look to the next sixty years, our journal's continuity is well situated to explore the relevance of Joyce's work in ways we can't even conceive yet. This is because the future of all academic disciplines will be even more linguistic than in the past. There is still much to discover in Joyce's engagement with aesthetics, politics, empire, identity, media, cultural memory, and literary revolutions, all of them created by and refracted through linguistic experiment. Among the many innovative presentations at the "James Joyce: Ulysses 1922-2022" symposium in Dublin were several digitally inflected projects involving virtual reality, theatrical performance, and natural language processing that transformed Joyce's work into new kinds of objects and new forms of evidence. This is hardly surprising, given the well-known fact that Marshall McLuhan's study of Finnegans Wake and its linguistic engagement with cinema and radio was foundational in the field of media studies.

Now we are in a new phase of media and computing, to which Joyce's work is highly attuned. The revolution in artificial intelligence has produced applications (OpenAI's ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, Anthropic AI's Claude, and Midjourney, to name a few) that are based on large language models (LLMs) that generate sophisticated writing and images in response to verbal prompts. Both types of [End Page 8] applications operate on the same transformer models that range over immense textual and visual corpora and "learn" context from sequential data like the syntax of sentences, not unlike Joyce's techniques for transforming cultural memory and the collective unconscious into new linguistic constructions. Something similar to Joyce's transformations occurs with DALL-E 2, for instance, which often produces images featuring "text" that so uncannily imitates the appearance—and in gloriously indirect ways the sense—of English words as to give the impression that the Wake predicted AI. See Figure 1, which illustrates a quote from the Earwicker children's Nightletter threatening their parents with "youlldied greedings" (FW II.ii 308). This is but one example of the new avenues now opening for Joyce studies, which share a large valence with poststructuralist modes of inquiry and the cultural studies we already know.

The chance to work as a co-editor of JJQ with Bob Spoo, and alongside Carol Kealiher and our graduate-student interns, is in a very real sense a dream come true. It has been such a pleasure to realize that the warmth and dedication of the Joyce community is reflected in our staff. I might be a newcomer to journal editing, yet it would not be possible without the continual support from colleagues at Joyce conferences who listened to graduate students and provided constructive feedback over the years. Carol and Bob were on the masthead when I wrote an undergraduate thesis on "Sirens" and a master's thesis on "Wandering Rocks" in the late 1990s; Sean Latham was on it by the time I wrote a dissertation and then book on Joyce and the new physics. Now the "old folkers" and the "new yonks" will together steer the journal through its next sexagenarian phase! [End Page 9]

[End Page 10]