James Joyce Modernism And Postmodernism

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading Joyce - useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found. Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-post-modernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work's ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts - the first constrained by the precious, would be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.

The present book argues that modernism and postmodernism coexist dialectically in all works of James Joyce beginning from Dubliners to Finnegan's Wake. The contextualizing aesthetic approach of this study attends to both textual and contextual features of Joyce's fiction. The dynamism of Joyce's fiction arises out of three dialectics of text/context, European universalism/Irish provincialism, and coliniser/colonised. Detecting and analysing these dialectics fill in the gap of Joyce criticism which is not only marked by a reductive text-oriented perspective but also splits the early from the late Joyce. The book provides a detailed analysis of modernism and postmodernism in the light of which Joyce's fiction is viewed. Relocating Joyce in his Irish context, to which his fiction remains loyal, gives the scope of the book a postcolonial dimension as well.

In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914 is a defense of literary modernism that recognizes for the first time that the deepest goal of high modernism is to establish a renewed humanism for the twentieth century. Recent critiques of modernism have tended to diminish its literary standing by emphasizing the reactionary politics of the period and connecting the literature to those developments as complicit or at least parallel. In his incisive readings of four pillars of high modernism--James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot--Stephen Sicari returns the focus instead to the rich and complex imaginative texts themselves for a fuller reading that rescues these works from the narrow political contexts of postmodern criticism. Sicari reassesses key modernist writers as important thinkers of their age who, through complex and often experimental art, debunked inherited models for representing the human experience. He employs a formalist approach toward a historicist goal, offering original readings of canonical modernists as responding to the rational, reductive view of humanity espoused by scientists and social scientists such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud. In the work of each of his subjects, Sicari traces the emergence of a new or renewed humanism, often connected to the early modern humanist views of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He also explores the interconnectivity of religion and literature in these works, not only in the views of the explicitly Christian writer Eliot and the more obliquely Christian writer Joyce, but also, Sicari contends, in the conclusion reached by all of four writers that a renewed humanism in the modern period will be found in a faith-based understanding of humanity and destiny. In mapping the persistence of a humanist tradition throughout modernism, Sicari delineates a path through the movement that ultimately replaces the skepticism and pessimism of modernity with humanist values and virtues. Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914 offers a valuable new lens through which to view ongoing theoretical and aesthetic debates within modernist studies.

In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

Reading on the Edge explores the notion of multiple cultural identity and exile in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. Focusing on the cultural politics of modernism through the prism of cultural theory, the book reconceives each author's work while at the same time redrawing modernism's traditionally Eurocentric disciplinary boundaries. The book therefore has wide implications for our understanding of modernism and the modernist canon.

More than a century after its beginnings, modernism still has the power to shock, alienate or challenge readers. Modernist art and literature remain thought of as complex and difficult. This introduction explains in a readable, lively style how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres. Pericles Lewis offers students a survey of literature and art in England, Ireland and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also provides an overview of critical thought on modernism and its continuing influence on the arts today, reflecting the interests of current scholarship in the social and cultural contexts of modernism. The comparative perspective on Anglo-American and European modernism shows how European movements have influenced the development of English-language modernism. Illustrated with works of art and featuring suggestions for further study, this is the ideal introduction to understanding and enjoying modernist literature and art.