John Casey
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195092950
- eISBN:
- 9780199869732
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092950.003.0019
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
We return to Joyce and an irony directed at religious belief that is, nevertheless, not satire. Finally, beliefs about heaven and hell are rooted in the moral world within. Nietzsche's perspectivism ...
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We return to Joyce and an irony directed at religious belief that is, nevertheless, not satire. Finally, beliefs about heaven and hell are rooted in the moral world within. Nietzsche's perspectivism is relevant to that. Our image of heaven and hell is finally an image of how we judge ourselves.Less
We return to Joyce and an irony directed at religious belief that is, nevertheless, not satire. Finally, beliefs about heaven and hell are rooted in the moral world within. Nietzsche's perspectivism is relevant to that. Our image of heaven and hell is finally an image of how we judge ourselves.
Jon Hegglund
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199796106
- eISBN:
- 9780199932771
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796106.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal ...
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This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.Less
This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.
Philip Kitcher
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195321029
- eISBN:
- 9780199851317
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195321029.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains ...
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James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread. Its linguistic novelties, layered allusions, and experimental form can make it seem impenetrable. This book attempts to dissolve the darkness that surrounds the Wake and to display instead its mesmerizing play of light. The book offers an original, appealing interpretation of Joyce's novel while also suggesting an approach to the magnum opus. Focusing throughout on the book's central themes, the book proposes that Finnegans Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question—“What makes a life worth living?”—that Joyce explores from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now at its end. Alert to echoes, the book progresses through the novel, adding texture to his portrait of an aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and who he has been. The novel's complex dream language becomes meaningful when seen as a way for Joyce to investigate issues that are hard to face directly, common though they may be. At times the view is clouded, at times it's the music or sheer comedy that predominates, but one experiences in the retrospective momentum a brilliant clarity unlike anything else in literature. With a startlingly profound compassion and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel, this book believes, is a call to life itself.Less
James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread. Its linguistic novelties, layered allusions, and experimental form can make it seem impenetrable. This book attempts to dissolve the darkness that surrounds the Wake and to display instead its mesmerizing play of light. The book offers an original, appealing interpretation of Joyce's novel while also suggesting an approach to the magnum opus. Focusing throughout on the book's central themes, the book proposes that Finnegans Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question—“What makes a life worth living?”—that Joyce explores from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now at its end. Alert to echoes, the book progresses through the novel, adding texture to his portrait of an aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and who he has been. The novel's complex dream language becomes meaningful when seen as a way for Joyce to investigate issues that are hard to face directly, common though they may be. At times the view is clouded, at times it's the music or sheer comedy that predominates, but one experiences in the retrospective momentum a brilliant clarity unlike anything else in literature. With a startlingly profound compassion and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel, this book believes, is a call to life itself.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development ...
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According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.Less
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.
Thomas Karshan
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199603985
- eISBN:
- 9780191725333
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603985.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of ...
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In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of games: chess, Scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play. This book studies this central theme in Nabokov, and the first work apart from Boyd's critical biography to draw in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, only collected and republished in 1999 to 2000, and on highly restricted archival material in New York and Washington. It argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and indeed that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. It traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As it does so it demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and Alexander Pope and the humanist tradition of the literary game. As such it provides what is the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for and influence on contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard.Less
In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of games: chess, Scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play. This book studies this central theme in Nabokov, and the first work apart from Boyd's critical biography to draw in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, only collected and republished in 1999 to 2000, and on highly restricted archival material in New York and Washington. It argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and indeed that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. It traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As it does so it demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and Alexander Pope and the humanist tradition of the literary game. As such it provides what is the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for and influence on contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard.
Angela Frattarola
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056074
- eISBN:
- 9780813053868
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056074.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, ...
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Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.Less
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.
David L. McMahan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195183276
- eISBN:
- 9780199870882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183276.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This chapter examines the conditions under which Buddhist practices of mindfulness have come to take on a new significance within the context of modernity’s broad affirmation of the ordinary world. ...
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This chapter examines the conditions under which Buddhist practices of mindfulness have come to take on a new significance within the context of modernity’s broad affirmation of the ordinary world. More specifically, modern articulations of mindfulness are informed by modern literature’s valorization of the details of everyday life, its finely tuned descriptions of the flow of consciousness, and its new reverence for ordinary objects and their capacity to reflect the universal. These are reflected in the work of authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Herman Hesse, who have been hidden resources for a modern re-interpretation of mindfulness. Further, this understanding provides a distinctively modern way of re-sacralizing and re-enchanting the world without resort to the supernatural, as in the work of Thich Nhat Hanh.Less
This chapter examines the conditions under which Buddhist practices of mindfulness have come to take on a new significance within the context of modernity’s broad affirmation of the ordinary world. More specifically, modern articulations of mindfulness are informed by modern literature’s valorization of the details of everyday life, its finely tuned descriptions of the flow of consciousness, and its new reverence for ordinary objects and their capacity to reflect the universal. These are reflected in the work of authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Herman Hesse, who have been hidden resources for a modern re-interpretation of mindfulness. Further, this understanding provides a distinctively modern way of re-sacralizing and re-enchanting the world without resort to the supernatural, as in the work of Thich Nhat Hanh.
John Casey
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195092950
- eISBN:
- 9780199869732
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092950.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
Christianity from its earliest times taught the existence of heaven and hell as places where good and evil deeds in this life were judged, rewarded and punished. In the course of time ideas both of ...
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Christianity from its earliest times taught the existence of heaven and hell as places where good and evil deeds in this life were judged, rewarded and punished. In the course of time ideas both of promised bliss and threatened woe went beyond anything than can have a purchase on human experience. Nevertheless, in their most developed form, doctrines of heaven and hell were explorations of moral psychology, as seen in their greatest imaginative expression, Dante's Divine Comedy. The present book explores and comments on ideas about post-mortem existence from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, as well as in Christianity and (more briefly) Islam. Having traced the early history, growth, and refinement of these ideas over five millennia, it ends with the discordant voices of spiritualism, liberal theology, Mormonism, Evangelical Christian preachers of Rapture and Armageddon, modern Muslim apocalyptics, and Coptic visions of the Last Days. In a Prologue and an Epilogue the ironic treatment of some of these themes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is evoked to set them in a context of modernity.Less
Christianity from its earliest times taught the existence of heaven and hell as places where good and evil deeds in this life were judged, rewarded and punished. In the course of time ideas both of promised bliss and threatened woe went beyond anything than can have a purchase on human experience. Nevertheless, in their most developed form, doctrines of heaven and hell were explorations of moral psychology, as seen in their greatest imaginative expression, Dante's Divine Comedy. The present book explores and comments on ideas about post-mortem existence from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, as well as in Christianity and (more briefly) Islam. Having traced the early history, growth, and refinement of these ideas over five millennia, it ends with the discordant voices of spiritualism, liberal theology, Mormonism, Evangelical Christian preachers of Rapture and Armageddon, modern Muslim apocalyptics, and Coptic visions of the Last Days. In a Prologue and an Epilogue the ironic treatment of some of these themes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is evoked to set them in a context of modernity.
Rahul Rao
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199560370
- eISBN:
- 9780191721694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560370.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations and Politics
The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently ...
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The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently for the success of national liberation movements. This ambiguous attitude towards nationalism was underpinned by complex spatial imaginaries of threat, in which the freedom of the political communities with which they identified was perceived to be threatened both from outside and within. As anti‐imperialists, they made the case for subaltern nationalism; but an anxiety about the oppressions inherent in nationalist mobilization also led them to a critique of nationalism. Tagore, Said, and Fanon attempted to square this circle by viewing nationalism as a transitory stage through which subaltern resistance must pass to recuperate the identity and sense of self that imperialism had trampled underfoot, but which must then subsume itself in postcolonial universality once this goal had been attained.Less
The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently for the success of national liberation movements. This ambiguous attitude towards nationalism was underpinned by complex spatial imaginaries of threat, in which the freedom of the political communities with which they identified was perceived to be threatened both from outside and within. As anti‐imperialists, they made the case for subaltern nationalism; but an anxiety about the oppressions inherent in nationalist mobilization also led them to a critique of nationalism. Tagore, Said, and Fanon attempted to square this circle by viewing nationalism as a transitory stage through which subaltern resistance must pass to recuperate the identity and sense of self that imperialism had trampled underfoot, but which must then subsume itself in postcolonial universality once this goal had been attained.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among the most “novelistic,” and thus reputedly individualizing, of novels. It demonstrates that the novel's interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind. The book considers four would-be playwrights noted for their antitheatricality. From William Makepeace Thackeray's hatred of pretense and George Eliot's suspicion of vain women to Henry James's early diagnoses of the culture of publicity and James Joyce's contempt for Buck Mulligan's performative flourishes, these writers are capable of rhetorically employing “theater” as a synonym for everything they most despise.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among the most “novelistic,” and thus reputedly individualizing, of novels. It demonstrates that the novel's interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind. The book considers four would-be playwrights noted for their antitheatricality. From William Makepeace Thackeray's hatred of pretense and George Eliot's suspicion of vain women to Henry James's early diagnoses of the culture of publicity and James Joyce's contempt for Buck Mulligan's performative flourishes, these writers are capable of rhetorically employing “theater” as a synonym for everything they most despise.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet ...
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This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet drama of the Nighttown (or “Circe”) episode of Ulysses. Joyce's experiments with theatrical form constitute a running commentary on his interest in the “depths” of the psyche. The different conceptions of theatrical space embedded in the idea of epiphany lend a dual valence to this keystone of Joycean aesthetics. If, on the one hand, epiphany imagines a humiliating theater of psychic exposure, on the other it gestures toward a perverse collective space where such exposures would lose their policing force. These isolating and collectivist impulses are both visible in Joyce's play Exiles, which follows Ibsenesque naturalism in its representation of psychic motivation but allows its characters to mount a notable collective resistance to the diagnostic imperative structuring their stage existence.Less
This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet drama of the Nighttown (or “Circe”) episode of Ulysses. Joyce's experiments with theatrical form constitute a running commentary on his interest in the “depths” of the psyche. The different conceptions of theatrical space embedded in the idea of epiphany lend a dual valence to this keystone of Joycean aesthetics. If, on the one hand, epiphany imagines a humiliating theater of psychic exposure, on the other it gestures toward a perverse collective space where such exposures would lose their policing force. These isolating and collectivist impulses are both visible in Joyce's play Exiles, which follows Ibsenesque naturalism in its representation of psychic motivation but allows its characters to mount a notable collective resistance to the diagnostic imperative structuring their stage existence.
Nicholas Allen
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199212989
- eISBN:
- 9780191594205
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212989.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The relationship between the study of classical culture and the formation of empire is well established. This chapter traces alternate spaces of engagement within the decolonizing public sphere in ...
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The relationship between the study of classical culture and the formation of empire is well established. This chapter traces alternate spaces of engagement within the decolonizing public sphere in Ireland. It focuses on a range of twentieth‐century writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney. Specific focus is given to the ways in which contemporary events, including independence, partition and state formation, have been represented through images of the ancient past in a form of vernacular classicism. Ideas of literary and political language, from the epic to the republic, took revolutionary form in the modernist works of Joyce and Yeats. For the subsequent generations of MacNeice, Longley, and Heaney, the classical world has allowed culture to engage with, and question, the violent legacies of colonization.Less
The relationship between the study of classical culture and the formation of empire is well established. This chapter traces alternate spaces of engagement within the decolonizing public sphere in Ireland. It focuses on a range of twentieth‐century writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney. Specific focus is given to the ways in which contemporary events, including independence, partition and state formation, have been represented through images of the ancient past in a form of vernacular classicism. Ideas of literary and political language, from the epic to the republic, took revolutionary form in the modernist works of Joyce and Yeats. For the subsequent generations of MacNeice, Longley, and Heaney, the classical world has allowed culture to engage with, and question, the violent legacies of colonization.
Lee Spinks
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638352
- eISBN:
- 9780748671632
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638352.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book investigates the life, works and critical reputation of James Joyce. Joyce's peripatetic career and complex reinvention of modern Western culture has made him a subject of enduring ...
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This book investigates the life, works and critical reputation of James Joyce. Joyce's peripatetic career and complex reinvention of modern Western culture has made him a subject of enduring fascination and established him as perhaps the greatest and most enigmatic literary figure of the twentieth century. Part I of this book provides a concise narrative of Joyce's life and literary career. Part 2 discusses a critical commentary upon all of Joyce's prose works and explores the style and significance of his poetry and drama. The last part reviews a historical overview of the critical reception of Joyce's work in order to examine how particular styles of reading and modes of critical practice have influenced the understanding of Joyce.Less
This book investigates the life, works and critical reputation of James Joyce. Joyce's peripatetic career and complex reinvention of modern Western culture has made him a subject of enduring fascination and established him as perhaps the greatest and most enigmatic literary figure of the twentieth century. Part I of this book provides a concise narrative of Joyce's life and literary career. Part 2 discusses a critical commentary upon all of Joyce's prose works and explores the style and significance of his poetry and drama. The last part reviews a historical overview of the critical reception of Joyce's work in order to examine how particular styles of reading and modes of critical practice have influenced the understanding of Joyce.
Dirk Van Hulle
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813032009
- eISBN:
- 9780813039657
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813032009.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, this book re-imagines the links between them. The readings reveal ...
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By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, this book re-imagines the links between them. The readings reveal that the most striking similarities between these two lie not in their nationality or style but in their shared fascination with the process of revision. The book's application of genetic theory—the study of a work from manuscript to final form in its various iterations—marks a new phase in this dynamic field of inquiry.Less
By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, this book re-imagines the links between them. The readings reveal that the most striking similarities between these two lie not in their nationality or style but in their shared fascination with the process of revision. The book's application of genetic theory—the study of a work from manuscript to final form in its various iterations—marks a new phase in this dynamic field of inquiry.
Steve Reich
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195151152
- eISBN:
- 9780199850044
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151152.003.0061
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Luciano Berio. Reich says that when he studied with Berio from 1961 to 1963 at Mills, Berio early on played a tape piece of his, Omaggio a Joyce, which ...
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This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Luciano Berio. Reich says that when he studied with Berio from 1961 to 1963 at Mills, Berio early on played a tape piece of his, Omaggio a Joyce, which showed again how speech—often broken down into the syllables of Finnegan's Wake—could be a riveting source for tape music as well. It was far more interesting to Reich than tape pieces made with electronically generated tones and it encouraged him later in 1965–66 with his own speech tape pieces.Less
This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Luciano Berio. Reich says that when he studied with Berio from 1961 to 1963 at Mills, Berio early on played a tape piece of his, Omaggio a Joyce, which showed again how speech—often broken down into the syllables of Finnegan's Wake—could be a riveting source for tape music as well. It was far more interesting to Reich than tape pieces made with electronically generated tones and it encouraged him later in 1965–66 with his own speech tape pieces.
Michael Patrick Gillespie (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813035291
- eISBN:
- 9780813038483
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813035291.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book presents, in a single collection, chapters in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's ...
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This book presents, in a single collection, chapters in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field. Offering three chapters each on Joyce's four main works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake), the book provides a contextual general introduction, as well as short introductions to each section that describe the chapters that follow and their original contribution to the field.Less
This book presents, in a single collection, chapters in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field. Offering three chapters each on Joyce's four main works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake), the book provides a contextual general introduction, as well as short introductions to each section that describe the chapters that follow and their original contribution to the field.
John Casey
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195092950
- eISBN:
- 9780199869732
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092950.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
This chapter explores the evaporation, in effect, of real assent to beliefs in the afterlife, especially in hell. Starting from the author's personal experiences of Catholicism before Vatican II, it ...
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This chapter explores the evaporation, in effect, of real assent to beliefs in the afterlife, especially in hell. Starting from the author's personal experiences of Catholicism before Vatican II, it goes on to consider whether in the modern world such beliefs are inevitably entertained with ironic overtones. The hell sermons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are of exceptional interest here, for Joyce is able to deploy irony toward a boy's belief in hell, and the Catholic traditions that stand behind it, while holding back from satire.Less
This chapter explores the evaporation, in effect, of real assent to beliefs in the afterlife, especially in hell. Starting from the author's personal experiences of Catholicism before Vatican II, it goes on to consider whether in the modern world such beliefs are inevitably entertained with ironic overtones. The hell sermons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are of exceptional interest here, for Joyce is able to deploy irony toward a boy's belief in hell, and the Catholic traditions that stand behind it, while holding back from satire.
MARJORIE PERLOFF
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197262795
- eISBN:
- 9780191753954
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197262795.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter suggests that the poetics of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein may be seen as two sides of the same coin. It begins by examining that coin itself, which is the Modernist aesthetic, shared ...
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This chapter suggests that the poetics of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein may be seen as two sides of the same coin. It begins by examining that coin itself, which is the Modernist aesthetic, shared by Eliot and Stein, even as it was shared by Pound and Joyce, and the other central figures of the period.Less
This chapter suggests that the poetics of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein may be seen as two sides of the same coin. It begins by examining that coin itself, which is the Modernist aesthetic, shared by Eliot and Stein, even as it was shared by Pound and Joyce, and the other central figures of the period.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ...
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This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by ...
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This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.Less
This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.
