Description
Book SynopsisIn 1929, ten years before James Joyce completed "Finnegans Wake", Sylvia Beach published a strange book with a stranger title: "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress". Worried by the confusion and attacks that constituted the general reception of his "Work in Progress" (the working title for "Finnegans Wake"), Joyce orchestrated this collection of twelve essays and two 'letters of protest' from such writers as Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams. "Our Exagmination" represents an altogether unusual hybrid of criticism and advertisement, and since its first appearance has remained a touchstone as well as a point of contention for Joyce scholars. Eighty years later, Joyce's "Disciples Disciplined" reads the "Exagmination" as an integral part of the larger composition history and interpretive context of "Finnegans Wake" itself. This new collection of essays by fourteen outstanding Joycean scholars offers one essay in response to each of the original "Exagmination" contributions. From philosophically informed exegeses and new conceptions of international modernism to considerations of dance, film, and the flourishing field of genetic studies, these essays together exemplify an interdisciplinary criticism that is also a lively and ongoing conversation with that criticism's history.
Trade Review'The overall quality is exceptionally high.' James Joyce Literary Supplement Fall 2011 'I can confirm that the book is even better than the cover - a truly tasty, haute-cuisine omelette of Joyce criticism. - I will say that Conley's collection offers a stimulating introduction to the context that produced both the Exagmination and the Wake. Starting with Eugene Jolas's transition journal where the chapters from 'Work in Progress' were first published, as well as most of the essays in Our Exagmination, it situates Joyce's aesthetic project in relation to the great literary, cultural, and political debates of late modernism. - Conley claims that, unlike Joyce, he has given very few directions to his commentators and that, as a result, each felt free to react accordingly to his or her own sensibility and expertise. The result is a collection of diverse readings both prolonging the tradition and reaffirming the importance of the Exagmination since - as Conley notes - 'The "Joyce industry" starts here.' James Joyce Quarterly 48 (1) 2010
Table of ContentsIntroduction, Tim Conley; Dangerous Identifications, or Beckett's Italian Hoagie, Jean-Michel Rabate; The Life of Brion's 'Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce', Sam Slote; Joyce, the Master Craftsman: Frank Budgen and the Making of the Wake, Dirk Van Hulle; Postlegomena to Stuart Gilbert's Prolegomena, Patrick McCarthy; Eugene Jolas and the Joycean Word in Transition, Andrew J. Mitchell; The Prosaic 'Rhythm of the Successive Pictures', or Going to the Movies with James Joyce and Victor Llona, Moshe Gold; Joyce En Pointe: Robert McAlmon Reviews an Irish Word Ballet, Carol Loeb Shloss; Thomas McGreevy and 'The Catholic Element' in Joyce, John Nash; Disappointment and Transcendence: Reading for the Plot and Not in Finnegans Wake, Pamela Brown; The Secret, the Baffled, the True: John Rodker and Late Avant-Garde Reading, Laura Heffernan; Shocking Language: Robert Sage and the Circuitry of Meaning, Vicki Mahaffey; A Point for Intercultural Criticism, Stephen John Dilks; Finnegans Wake in a Dentist's Waiting Room, Finn Fordham; The Pleasure of Meeting Mr. Dixon, Fritz Senn; Index.
