The Visionary as Craftsman: Joyce’s Blake in the 1912 Trieste Lecture

Focusing on Joyce’s Blake lecture in Trieste (March 1912), this essay reads the incomplete autograph as a laboratory for an ethics of imagination. The talk frames Blake not as a mad or purely mystical seer but as a craftsman whose “hammered” words and plates expose the mind-forg’d manacles of modernity. Using the surviving Italian manuscript, the current paper aims to show how Joyce rejects medicalized or merely theosophical accounts and turns Blake’s visions into instruments of social critique (Church, State, Empire).