Conclusion: Before and After Film

Summarises how the context of Victorian moving image media helps explain how Joyce’s literary cinematicity seemed ahead of screen practice itself to contemporary directors and theorists. It underlines how Joyce’s visual imagination was so profoundly shaped by the popular visual culture which projected film remediated that he achieved ‘ultracinematographic’ effects in his fiction. This accounts for Joyce’s extraordinary receptiveness when it finally arrived. Thus Joyce extended classical ekphrasis into the modernity of moving photographic images, broadcasting and telecommunications. The conclusion recapitulates the importance of addressing the deficit in Joycean scholarship about visual media before the cinematograph. Hence we can appreciate that Joyce’s Volta remains a significant landmark in the creation of cinema and its revolutionary impact, both in the popular media-cultural imaginary and the Modernist arts. It was more than a passing business opportunity, but bound up with Joyce’s creative fascination with optics and moving images which did not diminish after its demise, as his fiction testifies. The conclusion emphasises that to understand Joyce’s relationship with the evolution of cinematicity, we have to dig deeper into its role in his work both before, as well as after the coming of film.