Description
Book SynopsisDid James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce's worksrevolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays that identify repressed elements in Joyce's writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts. Contributors include Joseph A. Boone, Marilyn L. Brownstein, Jay Clayton, Laura Doyle, Susan Stanford Friedman, Christine Froula, Ellen Carol Jones, Alberto Moreirias, Richard Pearce, and Robert Spoo.
Trade ReviewThe collected essays in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Susan Stanford Friedman tells us in her introduction, explore the various ways that Joyce’s work can be read as textual scenes of ‘repression, disguised expression, and fragmentary return.’ In the course of tracing the forms of these ongoing processes throughout the Joycean canon, the contributors cover a range of diverse topics, including the representations of the artist, Joyce’s Irishness as it relates to discourses of race and racialism, subjectivity and desire, and the figurations of the maternal. The essays are united by a shared interest in psychoanalytic and/or poststructuralist arguments about the intriguing dynamics and variable relationships between interacting texts.
-- Kimberly J. Devlin * James Joyce Quarterly *
