Across his career, as my past work and that of other critics such as Andrej Duszenko, Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeff Drouin and Ruben Borg has shown, Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, as in my wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, I will look at three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, I will discuss Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s time piece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality and technology.

Dr Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (2014) and of Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950 (2021) and the editor of Joyce's Nonfiction Writing: Outside His Jurisfiction (2018). She has written articles and chapters on topics including modernism, science and technology, representations of law and justice, and animal studies.