Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation


Book Description

Modernism has long been seen as either a symptom of decadence or a sign of emancipation. Vivian Heller argues that Joyce's writing cannot be categorized as either decadent or emancipatory because it is predicated on the dialectical intimacy of these two terms. Heller relies on Joyce's changing use of epiphany to trace the arc of his development, focusing on the negative epiphanies of Dubliners, the relativistic epiphanies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the retrospective epiphanies of Ulysses.




Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats


Book Description

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.




Dubliners


Book Description

This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time—the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century—was written when James Joyce was a precocious young graduate of University College. With great subtlety and artistic restraint, Joyce suggests what lies beneath the pieties of Dublin society and its surface drive for respectability, suggesting the difficulties and despairs that were being endured on a daily basis in the homes, pubs, streets, and offices of the city: underemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, poverty, hunger, emotional and sexual repression. No writer ever took more seriously the details, history, and culture of a particular place than Joyce did with his home city, and these stories combine dark humor with compassion and a searching eye for the causes of suffering. This new edition’s historical appendices include contemporary reviews (among them one by Ezra Pound) and materials on religion, the struggle for Irish independence, and Dublin’s musical and performance culture.




Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive


Book Description

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.




Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus


Book Description

"This study therefore begins by focusing on the character of Stephen. Stephen is, significantly, a time-obsessed writer who wishes to obtain the time-transcending status of an Ovid or a Homer. When the wider tale is examined in terms of Stephen's ambition, Ulysses emerges as, potentially, a "self-begetting" work - that is, the finished narration can be read as a creation of the aspiring writer featured within the narrative itself."--BOOK JACKET.




All Future Plunges to the Past


Book Description

All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses. The creative reworkings, or "translations," of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history. All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.




Panepiphanal World


Book Description

Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Composed between 1901 and 1904, at the beginning of Joyce’s writing career, these texts are often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce’s entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining characteristics of the epiphanies—silence and repetition, materiality and reflexivity—as a set of recurrent and inter-related tensions in the development of Joyce’s oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies throughout Joyce’s career. MacDuff compares Joyce’s concept of epiphany to classical, biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening of the sublime, Joyce’s epiphanies are rooted in and focused on language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt characterization of modernist literature and that the linguistic forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of Joyce’s contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles An Open Access edition of this book was published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.




Dubliners' Dozen


Book Description

Traditional readings of "Dubliners" have entrapped themselves in easy identifications with the narrator in the stories. Later critics have used strong overarching theories to explore the techniques through which the narrator produces these reductive effects. This study applies a different contemporary theoretical lens to each of the stories.




Pathologies of Desire


Book Description

Discussions of the self in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traditionally have a generic or a generalized quality: the self is modernist or postmodernist, essential or processive, unified or fragmented, etc. Pathologies of Desire takes a different tack: it shifts the ground of discussion, locating the self in relation to particular dispositions or traits of the subject, Stephen Dedalus. More specifically, it foregrounds three pathological states (autoerotic, paranoia, and the shame/guilt syndrome) as primary modes of self-aggregation - the unique power of painful inner splits and divisions to precipitate self-awareness, and to make the self self-reflexive. As challenges to self-understanding, anxiety (autoeroticism), persecution (paranoia), and humiliation (shame/guilt) are prime catalysts of those multi-layered linguistic resources that fortify Stephen's self with the means of comprehending its own angst. The fact that each particular self dissolves to make way for another underscores its purely contingent and transitional quality - it functions as a defense against the singularity of the pain that it generates. Stephen's ultimate prospect of creating new future selves is thus contingent on his power to liberate himself from the old ones' oppressive conditioning.




Modernism and Market Fantasy


Book Description

Examining work from Ford and Conrad's pre-war impressionism through Rhys's fiction of the late 1930s, the author shows how modernist innovation engages with transformations in early twentieth-century capitalism and tracks the ways in which modernist fiction reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions.