"[The] Buzz in His Braintree, the Tic of His Conscience": Consciousness, Language and the Brain in Finnegans Wake".

This essay intends to focus on the influences that contemporary medico-cultural discourse might have exerted on Joyce's imaginaire, and in particular on his treatment of stuttering in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, not only is stuttering a peculiarity of HCE and his projections, but also the symptom of a new poetic form, the highest achievement of Joyce's linguistic experimentation. From a cognitive perspective, such a disjointed language invites a reflection on the mechanisms of its production and its pragmatic effects. In this regard, HCE and his projections, in particular his two sons Shem and Shaun, enact and embody the paradoxes and limits of literary and non literary communication. On closer examination, it could be argued that Shem and Shaun are something more than their father's projection: provocatively, one could think of them as the left and right hemispheres of HCE's brain.