An Action-Oriented Approach to James Joyce’s Reading Notes

According to Richard Oram, a personal library even shows the writer's "intellectual life at once".1 Books and texts are sources of inspiration, and, by interacting with them, writers use them as repositories or databases of information. Since the invention of the first computer, the so-called "cognitivist" theories have often metaphorically related cognition to the way computers process information.2 The human cognitive apparatus continuously processes incoming sensory information, and was traditionally considered to be an internal, brain-bound system. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a more recent project that gathers and analyses Beckett's manuscripts, is also worth taking into consideration. Because both The "Finnegans Wake" Notebooks at Buffalo and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project focus on a writer's actions, their methodologies pave the way for an action-oriented study of Joyce's manipulation of written vehicles. The note "holmstock" is but one small part of a distributed network, of which only a minority will eventually reach the published text. Because of the complexity of the network, it is important to consider what all of its paths have in common: links between entities, variant or invariant, or relations between different stages of the writing process.