In this book-one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature-Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent ...engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce's source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts.
Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita's approach reveals Joyce's keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin's ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertility and reproduction. Alison Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce's work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.
This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas inFinnegans Wake-the dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his "book of the ...night." Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce composed this work to suggestwhy he wrote and arranged it as he did. Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four chapters and corresponding themes of theWake from the perspective of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and speech, glorified in theWake for its potential to express emotions and ecstasy. Jaurretche bases her study on important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce's view that prayer can imbue language with power. This book is an illuminating and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche's insights will guide readers' understanding of the style and structure ofFinnegans Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles
In August 1919, a production of James Joyce's Exiles was mounted at the Munich Schauspielhaus and quickly fell due to harsh criticism. The reception marked the beginning of a dynamic association ...between Joyce, German-language writers, and literary critics. It is this relationship that Robert Weninger analyzes inThe German Joyce.
Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century. The opening section follows Joyce's linear intrusion from the 1910s to the 1990s by focusing on such prime moments as the first German translation ofUlysses, Joyce's influence on the Marxist Expressionism debate, and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce's work. Utilizing this historical reception as a narrative backdrop, Weninger then presents Joyce's horizontal diffusion into German culture.
Weninger succeeds in illustrating both German readers' great attraction to Joyce's work as well as Joyce's affinity with some of the great German masters, including Goethe and Rilke. He argues that just as Shakespeare was a model of linguistic exuberance for Germans in the eighteenth century, Joyce became the epitome of poetic inspiration in the twentieth.
This volume, through Weninger's critiques and repositions, simultaneously revisits the fraught relationship between influence and intertextuality in literary studies and reassesses their value as tools for contemporary comparative criticism today.
Tim Conley's Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley ...argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley's accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce's work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten "uses" for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.
Bloomsday 100 Beja, Morris; Fogarty, Anne
10/2009
eBook
June 16, 2004, was the one hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. To celebrate the occasion, thousands took to the streets in Dublin, following in ...the footsteps of protagonist Leopold Bloom. The event also was marked by the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, where world-renowned scholars discussed Joyce's seminal work. This volume contains the best, most provocative readings of Ulysses presented at the conference.
The contributors to this volume urge a close engagement with the novel. They offer readings that focus variously on the materialist, historical, and political dimensions of Ulysses. The diversity of topics covered include nineteenth-century psychology, military history, Catholic theology, the influence of early film and music hall songs on Joyce, the post-Ulysses evolution of the one-day novel, and the challenge of discussing such a complex work amongst the sea of extant criticism.
Paying close attention to the extensive network of allusions Beckett derived from Joyce's writing, P.J. Murphy reveals how Beckett consistently echoed and engaged in dialogue with Joyce's works.
From the very beginning James Joyce's readers have considered him as a Catholic or an anti-Catholic writer, and in recent years the tendency has been to recuperate him for an alternative and ...decidedly liberal form of Catholicism. However, a careful study of Joyce's published and unpublished writings reveals that throughout his career as a writer he rejected the church in which he had grown up. As a result, Geert Lernout argues that it is misleading to divorce his work from that particular context, which was so important to his decision to become a writer in the first place. Arguing that Joyce's unbelief is critical for a fuller understanding of his work, Lernout takes his title from Ulysses, ‘I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve?’, itself a quote from Mark 9: 24. This incisive study will be of interest to all readers of Joyce and to anyone interested in the relationship between religion and literature.
In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, ...runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, 'hospitality', a term Rabaté understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to 'the other'. For Rabaté both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabaté examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabaté explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.
