Joyce Criticism: General 3: 2000-Present
- At March 26, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
- 0
General Joyce Criticism: 2000-Present
The works profiled below are criticism about Joyce and his entire oeuvre, rather than any specific work. This section details works written from 2000 to the present. The books are listed by publication date. Clicking a cover image takes you to Amazon.com. When Brazen Head commentary is unavailable, the publisher’s summaries are usually reprinted. Many of these profiles contain links to detailed reviews published in the James Joyce Quarterly or other academic journals. Unfortunately, most of these are gated behind a JSTOR paywall. If any knowledgeable Joyce reader would like to review, summarize, or provide additional information for any of these “uncommented” books, please drop us a line! Additional “general” criticism may be found by clicking the links below:
General Joyce Criticism
[Main Page | Criticism 1924-1979 | Criticism 1980-1999 | Criticism 2000-Present]
Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory and History
Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory and History
By Derek Attridge
Cambridge University Press, 2000
Available online at: Internet Archive
Publisher’s Description: Joyce Effects is a series of connected essays by one of today’s leading commentators on James Joyce. Joyce’s books, Derek Attridge argues, go off like fireworks, and one of this book’s aims is to enhance the reader’s enjoyment of these special effects. He also examines another sort of effect: the way Joyce’s writing challenges and transforms our understanding of language, literature, and history. Attridge’s exploration of these transforming effects represents fifteen years of close engagement with Joyce, and reflects the changing course of Joyce criticism during this period. Each of Joyce’s four major books is addressed in depth, while several shorter chapters take up particular theoretical topics such as character, chance and coincidence, historical writing and narrative as they are staged and scrutinized in Joyce’s writing. Through lively and accessible discussion, this book advances a mode of reading open to both the pleasures and the surprises of the literary work.
Contents:
1. Introduction: on being a Joycean
2. Deconstructive criticism of Joyce
3. Popular Joyce?
4. Touching ‘Clay’: Reference and reality in Dubliners
5. Joyce and the ideology of character
6. ‘Suck was a queer word’: Language, sex, and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
7. Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history
8. Wakean history: not yet
9. Molly’s flow: the writing of ‘Penelope’ and the question of women’s language
10. The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
11. Countlessness of live-stories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake
12. Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
13. The Wake’s confounded language
14. Envoi; Judging Joyce.
Semicolonial Joyce
Semicolonial Joyce
Edited by Derek Attridge
Cambridge University Press, 2000
Publisher’s Description: James Joyce’s fiction constantly engages with an Ireland whose present and past is marked by the long struggle to achieve full independence from Britain. Semicolonial Joyce is the first collection of essays to address the importance of Ireland’s colonial situation in understanding Joyce’s work. The volume brings together leading commentators on the Irish dimension of Joyce’s writing to present a range of voices rather than a single position on a topic which has had a major impact on Joyce criticism in recent years. Contributors explore Joyce’s ambivalent and shifting response to Irish nationalism and reconsider his writing in the context of the history of Western colonialism. The essays both draw on and question the achievements of postcolonial theory, and provide fresh insights into Joyce’s resourceful engagement with political issues that remain highly topical today.
Contents:
- Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge: Introduction
- Seamus Deane, “Dead ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments”
- Enda Duffy, “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Space”
- Majorie Howes, “Goodbye Ireland I’m Going to Gort: Geography, Scale and Narrating the Nation”
- Emer Nolan, “State of the Art: Joyce and Postcolonialism”
- Joseph Valente, “Neither Fish Nor Flesh: or How Cyclops Stages the Double-bind of Irish Manhood”
- David Lloyd, “Counterparts: Dubliners, Masculinity and Temperance Nationalism”
- Luke Gibbons, “Have You No Homes to Go To?: Joyce and the Politics of Paralysis”
- Katherine Mullin, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina: ‘Eveline’ and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda”
- Willy Maley, “Kilt by kelt shell kithagain with kinagain: Joyce and Scotland”
- Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “Phoenician Genealogies and Oriental Geographies: Joyce, Language and Race”
- Vincent J. Cheng, “Authenticity and Identity: Catching the Irish Spirit”
James Joyce: A Short Introduction
James Joyce: A Short Introduction
By Michael Seidel
Blackwell Publishing, 2002
Available online at: Internet Archive
Bob Williams: Michael Seidel is a professor at Columbia University, the author of many books on Joyce and others. He is also on the editorial board of The James Joyce Studies Annual. Appropriately to such a short book, the tone is brisk and the area to be covered marked out firmly. Seidel begins with Joyce’s fascination with language and observes that this fascination—an obsession—exercised Joyce’s creative genius throughout his life. Much the same can be said of his obsessions with Ireland and its church. The many obstacles of his youth became the fixtures with which he recreated the world. Inner conflicts, once acquired, are not easily dissolved; and Seidel describes convincingly the way that Joyce nurtured these conflicts in order both to commemorate and transform them. Rivalry and betrayal, the other springs of Joyce’s creative motions, also get ample treatment in proportion to the brevity of the book.
But what we have so far read are the indispensable preliminaries to the consideration of the individual books, and subsequent chapters concern themselves with the works in the order of their composition. There is a chapter each for Dubliners, Exiles and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The rest of the book is about Ulysses. The author promises little for the complex last work by Joyce, Finnegans Wake, but he sets out to cover the arc of creativity that culminates in the Wake. However, his quotations show that he is well acquainted with the Wake, and he begins on an incidental basis to do more than he proposes. He also points out that “It is one of the more powerful paradoxes in Joyce’s work that he sometimes says things more clearly in Finnegans Wake than he does elsewhere because he can get away with saying almost anything in Finnegans Wake.”
Seidel refurbishes Dubliners, dimmed for many modern readers by the similar effects of many later writers. The stories, extraordinarily Chekovian in spirit (although the evidence is strong that Joyce did not know Chekov’s stories at the time that he wrote Dubliners), are intricately connected and carefully constructed. Seidel develops this splendidly and adds important observations that are as fresh and original as the stories themselves.
Moving on to Portrait, some minor errors of small importance occur—the use, for example, of “drawing” instead of “drawling”—but the reference to Brother Michael (infirmarian at Clongowes) instead of to the dean of studies at University College Dublin is an error of a serious and inexplicable sort. Otherwise Seidel’s account of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is vigorous and sustainedly interesting, although the excessive preoccupation with the villanelle is curious.
Joyce’s one play, Exiles, is the ugly duckling that never became a swan but remains the focus for valuable study. Seidel manages in a fittingly brief discussion to indicate the importance of Exiles without allowing it more virtues than it deserves.
The first chapter on Ulysses concerns narrative strategies. Seidel finds that there are four: customary third person narration, conversational narration, interior monologue, and, Joyce’s specialty, fourth estate narration (to give it Seidel’s name). The last presents the most difficulties, as it contains the book’s musings upon itself, and is mainly seen as eruptions of text only tenuously connected with the more customary narrative levels. In his examination of mixed modes, however, Seidel may be rowing into a fogbank. One of the perplexities of Joyce’s method regarding direct quotation—the use of the tiret (dash) rather than conventional quotation marks—is that the reader can never be altogether certain that direct speech has ended and another voice begun. To interpret, as Seidel does, that a closing phrase may be a thought rather than a spokenutterance is doubtful at best. (Joyce, a connoisseur of ambiguity, would have loved this confusion.) The “deficiencies” of the tiret over the quotation marks are especially marked in Finnegans Wake. Alas, in an otherwise successful effort to illustrate the fourth estate narrational device, Seidel again gets caught up in poor editing. The text gives us “Beniobenone” for “Beninobenone,” “Martha” for “Marta,” and “Karmelopulos” for “Karamelopulos.”
Seidel next examines the Homeric structure of Ulysses. He admits that this can be transparent for most readers, but that they will be the poorer for ignoring it. He has further the good and rather rare sense to modify the too easily made assumption that Stephen is searching for a father and Bloom is searching for a son. However true this may be, its truth is more metaphoric than real. Seidel could have pushed the matter yet more: Homeric parallels are often ironic. Seidel then turns to the characters themselves. The idea of commenting on Ulysses by a study of each of the three main characters is original and, although brief, has merit. It asserts the humanity of Joyce as we look closely at Stephen, Bloom and Molly.
Much of the same line of thought continues in the chapter on the reflexive nature of Ulysses. Much of the book is turned in on itself. Much of the book is turned outward to the reader. This is in both cases part of the novel’s problems but even more of its charm. Seidel illustrates the reflexivity of Ulysses in a brilliant coda of alternative possible titles for Ulysses, all drawn from phrases used in the book itself.
The final chapter considers the relationship of Bloom and Molly. To what degree did Bloom connive at Molly’s affair with Boylan? The answer is equivocal and much in the same area as the troubled relationship between Richard Rowan and Bertha in Exiles.
One who has long been acquainted with the works that Seidel discusses will enjoy the book most. Despite the title and despite the titles of books like it, there is really no introduction to Joyce. The only introduction to the works of Joyce is reading the works themselves. Despite this general reservation, I would not hesitate to recommend this as one of the better examples of introductory surveys.
Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation
Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation
By Tim Conley
University of Toronto Press, 2003
An examination of error as a “portal to discovery.” Allen Ruch of the Brazen Head wrote a detailed review of Joyces Mistakes shortly after it was published.
Joycemedia: James Joyce, Hypermedia, and Textual Genetics
Joycemedia: James Joyce, Hypermedia, and Textual Genetics
By Louis Armand
Syracuse University Press, 2006
Publisher’s Description: There is a rigour and a set of seemingly limitless practical and theoretical demands involved with JoyceMedia that make it a difficult proposition for those more used to the “method” of applying theories that have already been worked out elsewhere. It is arguable, indeed, that after deconstruction, the fusion of genetics and hypertext represents the first major theoretical discourse to have emerged directly out of an engagement with Joyce’s texts. If this is truly the case, then there is every reason to consider that this volume-however tardy its arrival must seem to those who first heard news of it ten years ago-remains nonetheless “in advance” of itself, and that its “news” is, in fact, still to be received.
Contents:
- Louis Armand, “Introduction: Literary Engines”
- Donald F. Theall, “Transformations of the Books in Joyce’s Dream Vision of Digiculture”
- Mark Nunes, “Gaps and Convergences in the Joycean Network”
- Laurent Milesi, “Hyperwake 3D”
- Louis Armand, “From Hypertext to Vortext / Notes on Materiality and Language”
- Daniel Ferrer, “The Work of Joyce in the Age of Hypertextual Production”
- Marlena Corcoran, “Sirens to Cyclops: Momentary Juxtaposition in Genetic Hypertext”
- Michael Groden, “Problems of Annotation in a Digital Ulysses”
- Dirk Van Hulle, “An Electric Stereopticon: Distribution and re-Combination in Joyce’s “Guiltless’ Copybook”
- Thomas Jackson Rice, “I Do Mince Words, Don’t I? Ulysses In Tempore Belli”
- Alan R. Roughley, “Enten: Subjects: Burgess, Shakespeare, Joyce [Text, Intertext, Hypertext, Vortex]”
- Darren Tofts, “Assessing the Green Box Ulysses: Prolegomena to Joycean Hypertextuality”
A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen
A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen
By Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen. Edited by Edward Burns
University College Dublin Press, 2008
Publisher’s Description: Contains all of the extant letters written to each other by the renowned Joyce scholars, Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, between 1953 and 1984. In these frank letters, we are offered the opportunity to visit the creative process. The letters have been carefully annotated so that we can follow how their ideas are absorbed into their published writings. They do not hesitate to try out ideas on each other and they do not hesitate to express uncomfortable opinions. Their contributions to the common cause spark off each other.
James Joyce in Context
James Joyce in Context
Edited by John McCourt
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Publisher’s Description: This collection of original, cohesive and concise essays charts the vital contextual backgrounds to Joyce’s life and writing. The volume begins with a chronology of Joyce’s publishing history, an analysis of his various biographies and a study of his many published and unpublished letters. It goes on to examine how his works were received in the main twentieth-century critical and theoretical schools. Most importantly, it places Joyce within multiple Irish, British and European contexts, providing a lively sense of the varied and changing world in which he lived, which formed him, and from which he wrote. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.
Contents:
Part I: Life and Works
Stacey Herbert, “Composition and Publishing History of the Major Works: An Overview”
Finn Fordham, “Biography”
William S. Brockman, “Letters”
Part II: Theory and Critical Reception
John Nash, “Genre, Place and Value: Joyce’s Reception, 1904-1941”
Joseph Brooker, “Post-war Joyce”
Sam Slote, “Structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-structuralism”
Marian Eide, “Gender and Sexuality”
Luke Thurston, “Psychoanalysis”
Gregory Castle, “Post-colonialism”
Dirk Van Hulle, “Genetic Joyce Criticism”
Jolanta Wawrzycka, “Translation”
Eric Bulson, “Joyce and World Literature”
Sean Latham, “Twenty-first-century Critical Contexts”
Part III: Historical and Cultural Contexts
Cheryl Temple Herr, “Being in Joyce’s World”
M. Cullen, “Dublin”
Matthew Campbell, “Nineteenth-century Lyric Nationalism”
Clare Hutton, “The Irish Revival”
Patrick Parrinder, “The English Literary Tradition”
Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Paris”
John McCourt, “Trieste”
Brian Arkins, “Greek and Roman Themes”
Vike Martina Plock, “Medicine”
Michael Levenson, “Modernisms”
Timothy Martin, “Music”
Brian G. Caraher, “Irish and European Politics: Nationalism, Socialism, Empire”
Brandon Kershner, “Newspapers and Popular Culture”
Tim Conley, “Language and Languages”
Fran O’Rourke, “Philosophy”
Geert Lernout, “Religion”
Mark S. Morrisson, “Science”
Maria DiBattista, “Cinema”
Christine Froula, “Sex”
Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations
Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations
By Tim Conley
University of Toronto Press, 2017
The Brazen Head will have commentary on this book available soon.
Publisher’s Description: 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.
Joyce in Court
Joyce in Court
By Adrian Hardiman
Head of Zeus Press, 2017
A founding member of An Páirtí Daonlathach, the “Progressive Democrats” of 1985-2009, Justice Adrian Hardiman (1951-2016) was a lawyer and politician from Dublin. In 2000 he was appointed to the Irish Supreme Court, a position he held until his death. According to the Irish Times, “He was progressive on social issues, protective of civil liberties and individual freedoms and hostile to any attempt by the State to over-extend the limits of its role.” A powerful advocate for the Irish language, Hardiman was also a lifelong Joycean.
Publisher’s Description: Adrian Hardiman spent years researching Joyce’s obsession with the legal system, and the myriad references to notorious trials in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce was fascinated by and felt passionately about miscarriages of justice, and his view of the law was colored by the potential for grave injustice when policemen and judges have too much power. Hardiman recreates the colorful, dangerous world of the Edwardian courtrooms of Dublin and London, where the death penalty loomed over many trials. He brings to life the eccentric barristers, corrupt police and omnipotent judges who made the law so entertaining and so horrifying. This is a remarkable evocation of a vanished world, though Joyce’s skepticism about the way evidence is used in criminal trials is still highly relevant.
James Joyce and the Matter of Paris
James Joyce and the Matter of Paris
By Catherine Flynn
Cambridge University Press, 2019
Publisher’s Description: In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce’s imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce’s underexamined first exile in 1902-03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism’s efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book resituates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory.
James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction
James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction
By Colm MacCabe
Oxford University Pres, 2022
Publisher’s Description: This Very Short Introduction explores the work of this most influential yet complex writer, and analyses how Joyce’s difficulty grew out of his situation as an Irish writer unwilling to accept the traditions of his imperialist oppressor, and contemptuous of the cultural banality of the Gaelic revival. Joyce wanted to investigate and celebrate his own life, but this meant investigating and celebrating the drunks of Dublin’s pubs and the prostitutes of Dublin’s brothels. No subject was alien to him and he developed the naturalist project of recording all aspects of life with the symbolist project of finding significant correspondences in the most unlikely material. Throughout, Colin MacCabe interweaves Joyce’s life and history with his books, and draws out their themes and connections.
Joyce Writing Disability
Joyce Writing Disability
Edited by Jeremy Colangelo
University of Press of Florida, 2022
Publisher’s Description: In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities. The collection demonstrates the centrality of the body and embodiment in Joyce’s writings, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Essays address Joyce’s engagement with paralysis, masculinity, childhood violence, trauma, disorderly eating, blindness, nineteenth-century theories of degeneration, and the concept of “madness.” Together, the essays offer examples of Joyce’s interest in the complexities of human existence and in challenging assumptions about bodily and mental norms. Complete with an introduction that summarizes key disability studies concepts and the current state of research on the subject in Joyce studies, this volume is a valuable resource for disability scholars interested in modernist literature and an ideal starting point for any Joycean new to the study of disability.
Contents:
- Jeremy Colangelo, “Introduction: Disability Writing Joyce”
- Jeremy Colangelo, “Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners”
- Casey Lawrence, “Limping and Devious: The Disabled Male Body in ‘A Mother’”
- Boriana Alexandrova, “When the Personal Becomes Historical: Portrait and the Textual Memory of Childhood Trauma”
- Kathleen Morrissey, “Debility as Disability: Disorderly Eating in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
- Rafael Hernandez, “Dark Men in Mien and Movement: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses”
- Marion Quirici, “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics”
- John Morey, “Boulez, Cage, and the Disabled Wake”
- Giovanna Vincenti, “Joyce, Swift, and the ‘Creep o’er Skull’ of the Gods”
- Jennifer Marchisotto, “The Anti-Erasure of Lucia Joyce: Resignification of Mad Histories in Finnegans Wake”
Multiple Joyce
Multiple Joyce
By David Collard
Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022
Publisher’s Description: In one hundred short essays David Collard navigates James Joyce’s astonishing cultural legacy in the century since the publication of Ulysses in 1922. Holding up a funhouse mirror to our times, Collard finds a multitude of Joyces, in often ludicrous disguises, wherever he looks-whether at Ally Sloper, Borsalino hats, Anthony Burgess, Cher, first editions, Flann O’Brien, Guinness, Hattie Jacques, John Cage, Kim Kardashian, Lego, Moby-Dick, numismatics, perfume, pianos, Princess Grace, puns, The Ramones, Sally Rooney, Stanley Unwin, Star Wars, waxworks or Zylo spectacles. Endlessly reinvented and exploited, Joyce emerges as a ubiquitous, indispensable and ruthlessly commodified Everyman. As Rónán Hession puts it in his foreword, Collard is above all “good company.” Whether you’re a devout admirer or wary newcomer, this surprising, unconventional handbook offers an entertaining prompt to dive into the depths of Joyce’s ever-expanding universe with a new awareness that it is very much our own.
Joyce Criticism
[Main Page | General Criticism | Dubliners | Portrait | Ulysses | Finnegans Wake]
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Artwork: Loui Jover
Last Modified: 6 July 2022
Main Joyce Page: The Brazen Head
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com