UC EVENTS

Speaker: Russell Smith 

Date\Time: Thursday 19 February 2026, 12:30-13:30

Location: Building 1 Level A Room 1A21, University of Canberra (NB Room 1a21 is accessed from the foyer joining Building 1 and Mizzuna café); 

or Zoom: http://zoom.us/j/95029077504

Abstract

The first age of wireless communications also marked the twilight of the theory of the ‘luminiferous aether’, the notion of an undetectable substance permeating all space that allows the transmission of light, just as air allows the transmission of sound. For many scientists the theory was definitively laid to rest by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. However, the notion of the ether persisted well into the twentieth century, and the demonstration of wireless signalling was considered by some scientists and engineers, like Oliver Lodge and Guglielmo Marconi, to offer the possibility of communication with the spirits of the dead, or to allow the direct transference of thought without the mediation of speech or writing. Although apparently sceptical about these claims, James Joyce took an interest in this literature, incorporating into Finnegans Wake notes from his reading of Lodge’s Raymond (1916), a best-selling account of the messages Lodge believed he had received through a spiritualist medium from his son killed in the Great War. Joyce also made extensive use of Irish spiritualist Hester Travers Smith’s record of her conversations with the spirit of Oscar Wilde. Furthermore, one of Joyce’s notebooks records the following plan for the third and fourth chapters of the ‘Watches of Shaun’ in Book III: ‘Yawn: telegraph/telephone; Dawn: wireless/thought transference’. Joyce seems to have got this idea of wireless thought transference from A.M. Low’s popular science book Wireless Possibilities (1924). This paper examines how the Wake registers the persistence of the idea of a spiritual ether, and notes that, with key terms like ‘Communicator’ (the spirit of the departed) and ‘Medium’ (the psychically gifted receiver of these messages), these ideas were treated with a seriousness and exerted an influence on communication theory that their later relegation to ‘pseudo-science’ tends to obscure.

All are welcome!

Bio

Russell Smith lectures in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, including the collection Beckett and Ethics (2009) and numerous articles and book chapters, as well as on various topics in modernist and contemporary literature, theory and visual art. His current research examines James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in terms of the transformation of the idea of communication by wireless and radio in the first half of the twentieth century. He is convenor of the Canberra Finnegans Wake Reading Group, which has been holding readings and performances since 2019.

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