Alison Armstrong’s talk will explore Jolas’s transition magazine as a modernist vehicle for experiments with language and in the other arts. Joyce’s “Work in Progress” would become Finnegans Wake and was arguably the most important and interesting of all the linguistic experiments. 

Alison Armstrong is a writer and visual artist. Her book-length publications include the literary cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill 1986) and “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell UP 1993), as well as works of fiction, memoir, and criticism. Her criticism and reviews have appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, the James Joyce Broadsheet, and American Arts Quarterly, among other venues. She is currently developing a series of large pastel drawings of prehistoric stones found at sites in Ireland, including the Boyne Valley.