A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...
, particularly ''
Ulysses'' or ''
Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a bod ...
''. Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of
stream of consciousness
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver in 1840 in ''First L ...
. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic, employing multiple technical shifts as a form of thematic or subject development. In this latter respect, it is not merely an opaque or evident technique, such as is characteristic of
avant garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
prose, but technical shifts that are meant to be recognized by the reader and considered as part of the narrative itself. More than anything, however, Joycean has come to denote a form of extreme verbal inventiveness which tends to push the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...
towards multi-lingual
polysemy
Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a sin ...
or impenetrability. Joycean word play frequently seeks to imply linguistic and literary history on a single plane of communication. It therefore denies readers the simple denotative message traditional in prose in favor of the ambiguity and equivocal signification of poetry.
This is one of a whole series of adjectives based on authors' names, such as
Brechtian,
Kafkaesque,
Maloufian,
[{{cite web, url=https://theconversation.com/david-maloufs-an-open-book-is-poetry-to-sit-with-105572, title=David Malouf's An Open Book is poetry to sit with, website= The Conversation, date=6 November 2018, access-date=3 October 2022, quote=It might be that in a Maloufian world every object and phenomenon of nature takes on a human face just as in ancient Greece the Gods were as human in their impulses, rages and jealousies as any of us are; or it might be that in the Maloufian world we manage to share with nature its relentless, rhythmical inhuman moods.] Orwellian
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by pr ...
,
Pinteresque and
Shavian.
References
James Joyce