Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce Studies [Palgrave Advances Ser.] ( London : Palgrave/Macmillan 2004), 293pp. CONTENTS: chronology [ix]; list of abbreviations [xvii]; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Introduction: ‘The Whole of Joyce [1]; 1. Ronald Bush, ‘Joyces Modernisms [10]; 2. Garry Leonard, ‘James Joyce and Popular Culture [39]; 3. Eric Bulson, ‘Topics And Geographies [52]; 4. Joseph Valente, ‘Joyces Politics: Race, Nation, and Transnationalism [73]; 5. Marian Eide, ‘Joyce, Genre, and the Authority of Form [97]; 6. Vicki Mahaffey, ‘Joyce and Gender [121]; 7. Laurent Milesi, ‘Joyce, Language, and Languages [144]; 8. Sam Slote, ‘Joyce and Science [162]; 9. R. Brandon Kershner, ‘Dialogical and Intertextual Joyce [183]; 10. Margot Norris, ‘Joyce, History, and the Philosophy of History [203]; 11. ‘Michael Groden, Genetic Joyce: Textual Studies and the Reader [227]; 12. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Classics of Joyce Criticism [251]; Selected Bibliography [275]; Index 287. Introduction Joyce has often been described as caught up between an Irish past that he partly embraced and partly repudiated and an internationalist ethos often equated with high modernism. In other words, one may safely assert that Joyce was never an “organic intellectual” in Gramscis sense. [2] Marxist approaches […] critics […] rejected Joyce as the protoypical alienated petit-bourgeois who bought into a deluded view of history as cyclical and reactionary. (Vide Trevor Williams, Reading Joyce Politically , Florida UP 1997; n.p.; here p.2.] [1904:] a low moment in Irish history, even if it has been memorialised and rendered eternal by Ulysses. For the year 1904 was marked by political disappointment among Irish nationalists at a time when Parnells figre loomed large but more like an everlasting hangover, an unredeemable compound of failure, intrigue and division, the paradigm of betrayal and political impotence that Joyce kept in his memory when he went abroad. […] Nevertheless, the Easter Rising of 1916 became a motive in the Wake. [2] Note: this is probably an echo of the view that Roderick OConnor, the Republican leader, was the original of the central figure in the First Fragment – a presumptive view which traces from Symbol and Surface to Kenner , W. J. McCormack and onward through US academia.] [In the Notebooks] Joyce lays down the basis of a genetic theory of artistic development that will constitute the backbone of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . In Stephens initiation into a living poetics, he learns that the making of a work of art implies a complex process of “artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction” (P, 209.) What culminates into personal experience is a production of art and artifacts that follows the logic of living beings evolution. [3] [Summarises Margot Norris:] If Joyces aesthetic theories imply an immersion in the neo-Hegelian theory of a Bernard Bosanquet, Joyces link with his own Irish past through his name and family remains elusive. Is it only Irish history that can be called a nightmare? How serious was Joyce in his belief in a cyclical history? We have now realised that the idea that high modernism ignored history is based on a misunderstanding both of history and of modernism, and it is therefore crucial to repo[s]e the problematic of the theory of universal history that underpins Joyces later writings. [8] Ronald Bush, ‘Joyces Modernisms, pp.10-38 Joyces response to his predecessors [Ibsen, Flaubert, et al.] was cumulative and consistent: e attempted not to find a core problem and then derive the rational principle on which it could be solved, but, as Ibsen had done in When We Dead Awaken, to illuminate the contradictions of modernity by exploring his own implication in them, as individual and (as representative modern artist) as opponent. Neither “The Dead” nor A Portrait [… &c.] nor Ulysses nor Finnegans Wake can be said to resolve any of the problems of modernity, but they encounter them in a progressively more self-conscious fashon, in part by incorporating the histories of his predecessors into accounts of his own life, more tellingly by enlarging upon the way their ironies reflected on their own involvement in the problems they explored. (p.31.) Garry Leonard, ‘James Joyce and Popular Culture, pp.39-51 T. S. Eliot famously wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons, but Joyce is far more contextual than this. He asks: where did you buy the coffee? What brand? Who was it advertised and how did that affect the choice? What were you thinking when you bought it? […; p.46]. As my reading of moments of consumption suggests, the momentary is momentous because it remains unexplained and unaccounted for by what the Marxist critic Gramsci called “hegemonic discourse.” Discourse [47] more generally can be understood as the various conceptual frameworks that facilitate some modes of thought [by which] various institutions sustain their privileged position. […] (p.48.) The “escape” afforded by chronicles of disorder […] is not an escape from history but rather an escape from the historicised, to the not yet historicised, where the colonial subject may have access to actual possibilities ousted by the exclusionary “actualities” imposed by historical narratives. (p.49.) For Joyce the momentary is momentous; the “everyday” is not where we make history, but where we live and “low” art chronicles this disorder. If we seek the full splendor of Joyces accomplishment, examples of “low” art are what we must read and read doubly, instead of our Roman history. (p.50.) [See Bibliography, in Bibliographies, Bibliographies & Appendices / Relating to Major Writers / Joyce.]
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