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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.

Some young men and women at juvenile correctional facilities such as the Rhode Island Training School work to reconcile the two games, the Game of Outlaw and the Game of Law. However, the structural tension between the two games exists because of the opportunities and constraints of each. This tension creates new possibilities for reflection on and the transformation of each game, leading to the development of critical practice among the residents of juvenile correctional facilities. This chapter focuses on the critical practice, which is a second-order understanding of both games, an ability to see each as a “hustle” while not letting either dictate one's activity unconsciously. The goals of young men engaging in critical practice are no longer unrecognized aspirations for masculinity. Rather, young men engaged in critical practice seem to explore what it would mean to posit their own goals self-consciously. Instead of competing with one another over who can be the most masculine, they begin to think collectively and strategically about how to live their lives and how to address their common challenges.

Researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds propose competing explanations of aesthetic response. Though sometimes heated, these disagreements are not fundamental. Fundamental disagreement occurs when researchers from different backgrounds have different, even incompatible, conceptions of the phenomenon to be explained. There is currently a great deal of fundamental disagreement in research into aesthetic response. The remedy is ideally integration, wherein researchers in the different aesthetic sciences and humanistic studies converge on a common conception of what they are trying to explain, even if they continue to disagree about how to explain it. If it is to be successful, this convergence will require that researchers in both the scientific and humanistic disciplines be sensitive to the limitations that are inherent in each of these two different approaches. On the one hand, we should not expect a conception of aesthetic response that is productive for research across disciplines to be given a precise a priori definition. Aesthetic science, by identifying the mechanisms behind our aesthetic responses, tells us a great deal about the nature of this phenomenon that we would otherwise be unable to discover. On the other hand, aesthetic science must acknowledge that aesthetic response is embedded in critical practice, about which the humanities have a lot to say.

This chapter explores the implications for criminological scholarship and for juvenile correctional reform, arguing that the criminological literature is limited because it fails to acknowledge the role of masculinity in crime. It also argues that juvenile correctional reformers should consider the role criminally involved young men might play in bringing about needed reforms. The chapter discusses the classical, positivist, and subcultural perspectives of criminologists, and suggests implications for thinking differently about the mechanism by which juvenile correctional reform might take place, and about the actors who will bring it about. It also suggests that young men's individual rehabilitation must be connected to the collective rehabilitation of the world in which they live. To avoid the dual reproductions of outsider masculinity and insider masculinity, the challenge is for organizers, teachers, and young men themselves to create the space for critical practice.

This chapter is concerned with the growing success of both Mansfield and Murry. It shows how Mansfield's critical practice parallels Murry's in their mutual concern about the change in consciousness brought about by the Great War, and their disdain for post-war complacency and hypocrisy. Their cautious reaction to modernist innovations is considered in connection with a general progression of their thought towards a consolidation of modernist principles instead of an automatic reaction against traditional literary conventions. The chapter discusses their critiques of literary impressionism, their interest in the concept of impersonality, and their further interactions with Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Mansfield's tuberculosis continues to affect her marriage to Murry, and she interprets this dilemma in her story, ‘The Man Without a Temperament.’

This chapter discusses the importance of ‘reading Otherwise’. It examines the nature of the place from which the metropolitan critic speaks specifically in relation to Latin American cultures. It also reviews some of the major currents of thinking about the broad postcolonial context in order to see what tools are available for constructing an ethical critical practice. This chapter shows that putting pressure on the unreflective practice of transplanting theory is an important reminder of the ethical dimension of critical practice. It also demonstrates the cultural commodities that travel from the periphery to the metropolis.

This chapter discusses issues that humanities has in the public sphere. It considers some of the salient forms that the defense of the humanities has taken. It elaborates on an ethical task that is indissociable from forms of critical judgment and what might aptly be called the struggle against oblivion. It attempts to link critical practice to an ethical consideration of the forms of cultural aliveness and destruction for which we are compelled to struggle because they are linked with public questions of what is of value, and what should be.

This chapter centers on the idea of the documentary commons as a framework for understanding documentary’s engagement with social change. In the developing public commons, the documentary impulse is a way of life and articulation of political information that produces a kind of democratic exchange with new patterns of public communication. With the pervasive use of cameras and live broadcasts, the documentary impulse is realizing its potential to create participatory media cultures. Among the topics in this chapter are the possibilities for future research and contributions to theories of social change, participatory media cultures, collective identification, and agency. This chapter also addresses the political economy of social change documentary, the ideological glass ceiling of mass media, and the role of professional opportunity and education in shaping social change expectations.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how and why adaptation resists theorization at its second stage: the development of taxonomies. While taxonomization has been challenged as a theoretical enterprise generally, adaptation offers more particular resistance to it. As a process that crosses taxonomical borders of all kinds, adaptation is itself anti-taxonomical. Even so, examining how some scholars have sought to taxonomize adaptation and others have resisted adaptation taxonomies informs adaptation’s relationship to theorization. As with definitions, taxonomies have subjected adaptation to other disciplines and their taxonomies. While discussions of adaptation taxonomies have been largely focused on taxonomies from translation studies and narratology, adaptation has been subjected to a host of others, studied and organized by adapters, genres, nations, historical periods, media forms and technologies, and by the taxonomies of identity politics, which are rarely addressed as taxonomical systems. Moreover, disciplines are themselves taxonomies: certain disciplines (most notably philosophy, history, linguistics/rhetoric) have been accorded theorizing power in the humanities, while others have not. By contrast, adaptation inhabits all disciplines and cannot be satisfactorily theorized without input from them all. Joining scholars who have for centuries questioned the ability of rational and empirical epistemologies to theorize the arts, Chapter 6 argues for creative-critical adaptation practice as a way to generate dialogues between the theorizing and “non-theorizing” disciplines. As with definition, retheorizing adaptation theorization at the level of taxonomization is not a matter of deciding which taxonomies developed to study other things we should apply to adaptation but of taxonomizing adaptation as adaptation and of setting these in dialogue with the taxonomies we already have in adaptation studies.