Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History

by Derek Attridge

• ISBN13: 9780521777889
• ISBN10: 0521777887
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Joyce Effects is a series of connected essays by one of today's leading commentators on James Joyce. Joyce's books, Derek Attridge argues, go off like fireworks, and one of this book's aims is to enhance the reader's enjoyment of these special effects. He also examines another sort of effect: the way Joyce's writing challenges and transforms our understanding of language, literature, and history. Attridge's exploration of these transforming effects represents fifteen years of close engagement with Joyce, and reflects the changing course of Joyce criticism during this period. Each of Joyce's four major books is addressed in depth, while several shorter chapters take up particular theoretical topics such as character, chance and coincidence, historical writing and narrative as they are staged and scrutinized in Joyce's writing. Through lively and accessible discussion, this book advances a mode of reading open to both the pleasures and the surprises of the literary work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
References and abbreviations	xi
Preface	xiii
Introduction On being a Joycen	1	(1)
Mainly autobiographical	1	(12)
Mainly theoretical	13	(9)
Deconstructive criticism of Joyce	22	(8)
Popular Joyce?	30	(5)
Touching `Clay': reference and reality in Dubliners	35	(17)
A soft wet substance	35	(4)
A woman of no importance	39	(6)
On referring	45	(4)
Maria victrix	49	(3)
Joyce and the ideology of character	52	(7)
`Suck was a queer word': language, sex, and the remainder in A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man	59	(19)
Sex and the schoolboy	60	(5)
The remainder of language and the power of literature	65	(9)
The artist as a youngish man	74	(4)
Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history	78	(8)
Wakean history: not yet	86	(7)
Molly's flow: the writing of `Penelope' and the question of women's language	93	(24)
Stopping the flow	93	(13)
A female language?	106	(5)
Overflow	111	(6)
The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader	117	(9)
Countlessness of livestories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake	126	(7)
Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretion	133	(23)
First proposition	134	(7)
Second proposition	141	(7)
Third proposition	148	(8)
The Wake's confounded language	156	(7)
Envoi: judging Joyce	163	(26)
A commitment to Joyce	163	(5)
An industry without limits	168	(3)
A Joyce come to judgement	171	(3)
An excess of technique	174	(5)
A future for Ulysses?	179	(10)
Works cited	189	(12)
Index	201