Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.
Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists. In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the Renaissance in such figures as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Bruno. Joyce's own writing can itself be viewed through the rubric of renascence with the tools of genetic criticism and the many insights afforded by the translation process. Several essays in this volume examine this broader idea, investigating the rebirth and reinterpretation of Joyce's texts. Topics include literary historiography, Joyce's early twentieth-century French cultural contexts, and the French translation of Ulysses. Attentive to the current state of Joyce studies, the writers of these extensively researched essays investigate the Renaissance spirit in Joyce to offer a volume at once historically informed and innovative.
'... (MacCabe is) the most lucid, least blinkered expounder of the post-structuralist mysteries I have ever come across. This is an important, challenging book, which no Joycean can afford to ignore.'' David Lodge '... (this is) the most exciting and original book on Joyce to have appeared for many years ...' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman
Written in a clear and accurate language that students can understand, Trench's new book minimizes the number of explicitly stated theorems and definitions. Instead, he deals with concepts in a conversational style that engages students. He includes more than 250 illustrated, worked examples for easy reading and comprehension. One of the book's many strengths is its problems, which are of consistently high quality. Trench includes a thorough treatment of boundary-value problems and partial differential equations and has organized the book to allow instructors to select the level of technology desired. This has been simplified by using symbols, C and L, to designate the level of technology. C problems call for computations and/or graphics, while L problems are laboratory exercises that require extensive use of technology. Informal advice on the use of technology is included in several sections and instructors who prefer not to emphasize technology can ignore these exercises without interrupting the flow of material.
Tannis was the daughter of old Auguste Dumont, who kept the one small store at the Flats, lived in the one frame house that the place boasted, and was reputed to be worth an amount of money which, in half-breed eyes, was a colossal fortune. Old Auguste was black and ugly and notoriously bad-tempered. But Tannis was a beauty.
The resurgence of interest in James Joyce's politics over the past decades reveals Joyce as a politically astute, if not active, writer. But Joyce's politics were never easily codifiable or traceable to a set of ideologically fixed positions. Instead, this dissertation argues, Joyce uses the novel as a space where political debate can be dramatized, and the novel becomes a form of deliberative rhetoric regarding future possibilities. For Joyce, the practices of rhetoric and aesthetics are complexly intertwined and interdependent, though they remain, in many ways, oppositional and contrary. Joyce and other modernist writers often viewed rhetoric as a discursive form that limited rather than expanded possibilities. But at other moments, Joyce presses rhetoric into the service of aesthetic (and vice-versa) since deliberative rhetoric and poetics (as defined by Aristotle) both attend to the possibilities of future action. This dissertation traces Joyce's evolution from a young socialist writer engaged in rhetorical experiments with the essay to his later dramatization of Irish political oratory in Ulysses. Joyce began his career as a self-described "socialist artist" in 1904, but would consciously eschew socialism within the next few years. This dissertation locates Joyce's early political rhetoric in his essay "A Portrait of the Artist" and the abandoned novel Stephen Hero as unconscious remainders reemerging in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the later text, aesthetics attempt to replace rhetoric as a means of creating radical materialist consciousness, but the later text also re-incorporates and reimagines its earlier incarnations. The earlier texts remain as "symptoms" around which the later is written. Drawing on the definitions of "symptom" in psychoanalytic and Marxist theoretical practice, this dissertation argues that A Portrait of the Artist functions as a text because it includes, even though it attempts to rewrite, the political and rhetorical work of its antecedents. In crafting the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses, Joyce returns to the art of rhetoric to dramatize the arguments surrounding Irish labor, politics, and language in 1904 Dublin. Unlike his work in A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce presents oratory as a staging ground for reasoned debate and discussion regarding the future course of Irish history. Whereas rhetoric was an unconscious remainder of socialist politics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, rhetoric is consciously applied in the work of the characters in the episode who are preoccupied with the consequences of the Irish language movement and middle-class industrialization. This dissertation ultimately argues against positions that view rhetoric as a weak surrogate for aesthetics or as a discursive limitation that must be overcome for aesthetics to produce valuable contemplative effects. Aesthetics in Joyce's fiction has productive rhetorical purposes: to lead readers to contemplate false oppositions, consider the means by which history is produced, to attend to the process of political decision-making, and to deliberate about the consequences of actions.
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
An examination of the ways major novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf draw attention to their embodiment in the object of the book, The Death of the Book considers how bookish format plays a role in some of the twentieth century’s most famous literary experiments. Tracking the passing of time in which reading unfolds, these novels position the book’s so-called death in terms that refer as much to a simple description of its future vis-à-vis other media forms as to the sense of finitude these books share with and transmit to their readers. As he interrogates the affective, physical, and temporal valences of literature’s own traditional format and mode of access, John Lurz shows how these novels stage intersections with the phenomenal world of their readers and develop a conception of literary experience not accounted for by either rigorously historicist or traditionally formalist accounts of the modernist period. Bringing together issues of media and mediation, book history, and modernist aesthetics, The Death of the Book offers a new and deeper understanding of the way we read now.
