... The Study of Space in Literature 17 withdraws from this order of multiplicities ... The tensi... more ... The Study of Space in Literature 17 withdraws from this order of multiplicities ... The tension between these two, which Plato claims can be resolved only through an oniric or hybrid order of think-ing, will be reflected in the profusion of different and competing con-ceptions of space ...
A review of Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners," by Jack Morga... more A review of Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners," by Jack Morgan SPURR, David Anton. [Review of:] Joyce's city : history, politics, and life in Dubliners / by Jack Morgan. Columbia : University Of Missouri Press, 2015. James Joyce Quarterly, 2017, vol. 52,
James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel, 2011
This essay presents Balzac and Joyce respectively as chroniclers of the fate of artistic autonomy... more This essay presents Balzac and Joyce respectively as chroniclers of the fate of artistic autonomy in the modern world of bourgeois commercial capitalism. Both writers created the fictional character of an aspiring young writer who represents a version of the author himself at an early stage of his career. Both of these characters represent the purity and egoism of the artist-qualities surviving from a more traditional, aristocratic world-as confronted with the capitalist world of commercial literary production. In his efforts to obtain fortune and social position in addition to critical acclaim, Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré is drawn into an intrigue that leads to his self-destruction. Joyce has his own vision of literary production, but has in common with Balzac an absence of illusion concerning literature as an activity profoundly marked by the social and economic conditions of its production. Let me begin with the repetition of an improbable name: Paul de Kock. In Balzac's novel Illusions Perdues (1837-43), 1 the impoverished journalist Etienne Lousteau, needing a new pair of gloves for the evening, sells his review copies of a number of new novels, including one by de Kock, a newcomer to the literary scene. The pages of de Kock's novel are still uncut, and Lousteau will write the review without reading the book so as to be able to resell it. 2 A few pages later, Lousteau's editor tells him to write the review so as to compare de Kock favourably to Victor Ducange, an
Abstract:The Alfred Dreyfus affair is the central political event of Proust's A la recherche ... more Abstract:The Alfred Dreyfus affair is the central political event of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, just as the history of Charles Stewart Parnell, including the Special Commission hearings of 1888, haunts the pages of Joyce's work. For both writers, the respective cases serve as a kind of ironic measure by which different persons are defined according to their prises de position.Given the role of forgery in both cases, another consequence for the literary works in question has to do with the ambiguous nature of the letter and its unforeseeable consequences. Both Proust and Joyce produce fictional letters in their works that serve as analogies to the doubtful documents produced in court. Moreover, in these works, the function of the author as an implicit presence retreats progressively in the face of the enigmatic autonomy of the text, as if to acknowledge that the text has taken on a life of its own.
The contextual studies collected for this book, taken together, explore the notion that, in all o... more The contextual studies collected for this book, taken together, explore the notion that, in all of Joyce's major works, his idea of "altereffects" (alterity or otherwise) pervades his treatment of the modern condition. The author proposes a revitalized vision of modernism, taking Joyce as a privileged site upon which to build a broader cultural context. The book takes a comparative perspective, which raeds Joyce's work alongside that of, notable, Mallarme and Proust, seen here as inaugurating an alternative continental modernim to which Joyce belongs. This approach marks an alternative direction for Joyce studies and for modernist literary studies in general in that it negotiates between historicism and igh theory, combining the study of specific historical contexts with a theoretically informed reflection on the fundamental questions of modern human existence: the questions of being, of language, of the subject, of the very possibility of literature in the modern world.
Jonathan Ullyot's The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature rethinks the influence that e... more Jonathan Ullyot's The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than adapt the story of the Grail, modernist writers intentionally failed to make the Grail myth cohere, thus critiquing the way a literary work establishes its authority by alluding to previous traditions. While the quest to fail is a modernist ethic often misconceived as a pessimistic response to the collapse of traditional humanism, the modernist writings of Eliot, Kafka, and Céline posit that the possibility of redemption presents itself only when hope has finally been abandoned.
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