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This chapter provides a guide to landmark episodes in James Joyce criticism and key examples of the different ways in which his work is currently being read. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some critics identified a stylistic advance beyond both Edwardian and naturalistic fiction. Arnold Bennett's review provides praise and condemnation of Ulysses. Stuart Gilbert takes pains to highlight Joyce's classical literary heritage. The years between the end of World War Two and the explosion of critical interest in Joyce's work caused by the emergence of modern literary and cultural ‘theory’ saw the debate over his achievement and legacy steadily intensify. Joyce's work has a long and involved relationship with psychoanalytic criticism. Joyce's ‘general awareness of Irish politics’ expressed itself in a number of lasting commitments. There has been a problem with Joyce's belief in the cultural redemptiveness of the artwork.

Released in 2002, Eminem’s song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ signals itself as a child’s rebellion in its title by alluding to the common parental demand to clean up private space in the family home and using this as a metaphor for emotionally and mentally exorcising past traumas inflicted by the parent. Presented as an image of the repository for the clutter and ‘skeletons’ of the past, the closet is also both the psyche of the singer and a representation of the child’s space in relation to the mother, ultimately the womb. While acknowledging the formal difference between poetry and music lyrics, from a literary perspective it is worth considering how ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ has several facets in common thematically with a poem that has undergone considerable critical analysis: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’. In her guise as confessional poet, Plath has had some direct and indirect influence on popular music. For example, Madonna has named Plath, whom she read as a teenager, as one of her inspirations, and in some respects the lyrics to her songs bear direct comparison with ‘Daddy’, as does Eminem’s.

This chapter discusses the psychoanalytic criticism of literature, through Lacan, and Derrida, on ‘The Purloined Letter’. Derrida accuses Lacan of framing Poe's story to produce his own meaning: by omitting from his triangular structure the fourth voice that narrates, and which has another vision from the ones already discussed. Derrida argues that the itinerary of the letter is made to indicate castration as true of the woman: the truth remains, but the feminised position cannot claim it, because it is marked by lack. The chapter concludes with the Deleuzian critique of psychoanalysis, in seeing it as putting all the stress on the single subject, rather than in the conditions of discourse which construct that subject.

This chapter examines pain’s importance to the sensitized, embodied consciousness valued by William, Henry, and Alice James. All three siblings disdained what Henry once called “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” Yet William insisted that an individual’s higher capacities along with a more profound reality could best be accessed while physicality was numbed and waking consciousness was suppressed. For him anesthesia provided a gateway to the higher reaches of consciousness that his two siblings typically anchored in the feeling, suffering body. Henry and Alice repeatedly represent pain as comparable to an intense aesthetic experience in that it arouses the senses, increases responsiveness to stimuli, and heightens consciousness while still tethering the sufferer to the material world. They both count themselves among the rare few who possess this capacity for an aesthetic aliveness to suffering, which distinguishes them from purportedly less animate humans who in their assessment suffer less and hence invariably live less. Both siblings simultaneously stage the reconciliation of physical discomfort with material comfort at a time when their peers tended to view the two conditions as fundamentally antagonistic.