`Is there one who understands me?' So wrote James Joyce towards the end of his final work, Finnegans Wake. The question continues to be asked about the author who claimed that he had put so many enigmas into Ulysses that it would `keep the professors busy for centuries' arguing over what he meant. For Joyce this was a way of ensuring his immortality, but it could also be claimed that the professors have served to distance Joyce from his audience, turning his writings into museum pieces, pored over and admired, but rarely touched. In this remarkable book, steeped in the learning gained from a lifetime's reading, David Pierce blends word, life and image to bring the works of one of the great modern writers within the reach of every reader. With a sharp eye for detail and an evident delight in the cadences of Joyce's work, Pierce proves a perfect companion, always careful and courteous, pausing to point out what might otherwise be missed. Like the best of critics, his suggestive readings constantly encourage the reader back to Joyce's own words. Beginning with Dubliners and closing with Finnegans Wake, Reading Joyce is full of insights that are original and illuminating, and Pierce succeeds in presenting Joyce as an author both more straightforward and infinitely more complex than we had perhaps imagined. T. S. Eliot wrote of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, that it is `a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape'. With David Pierce as a guide, the debt we owe to Joyce becomes clearer, and the need to flee is greatly reduced.

Reissued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses' includes a new preface taking account of scholarly and critical development since its original publication. It shows how the now important issues of post-colonialism, feminism, Irish Studies and urban culture are addressed within the text, as well as a discussion of how the book can be used by both beginners and seasoned readers. Schwarz not only presents a powerful and original reading of Joyce's great epic novel, but discusses it in terms of a dialogue between recent and more traditional theory. Focusing on what he calls the odyssean reader, Schwarz demonstrates how the experience of reading Ulysses involves responding both to traditional plot and character, and to the novel's stylistic experiments.

This volume is the product of five years' work conducted by the London University Joyce Group on Circe, the longest chapter in Joyce's Ulysses. The essays explore specific, clearly defined themes: ventriloquy, stage directions, England, 'provection,' Circe as a meditation on the problem of totalization, the relationships between Circe and the Irish Literary Theatre, and between the early draft of Circe in V.A. 19 and the first edition text. But the volume also locates discussion within the framework of recent thought about the chapter. The primary features of current thinking on Circe would seem to be a certain scepticism with regard to totalizing accounts of the chapter; increasing attention to its aesthetic and discursive aspects, including the political aspects of its discursive practices; more concentrated reflection on the way in which Circe recycles material from other chapters in Ulysses; and a growing emphasis on the need to think about the chapter in more plural terms. The essays included here build on such developments to provide an original contribution to recent debate over the aesthetics of Circe.

This book discusses Jacques Lacan’s contribution to understanding the life and work of James Joyce, introducing Colette Soler’s influential reading to English readers for the first time. Focusing on Lacan’s famous Seminar on Joyce, the reader will no doubt learn much from Lacan, but also, as Soler shows, what Lacan learned from Joyce and what perhaps, without him, he would not have approached with so much confidence. Le Sinthome. This is the title Jacques Lacan chose for his seminar devoted to Joyce in 1975–76. He wrote the word 'sinthome' in its original spelling, from the Greek, and thus used the technique so dear to Joyce: the equivocation between the sound that is heard and the graphic representation that is seen. Is it surprising that the author who recognised in 1956 with 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious' that the Freudian practice of speech revealed an unconscious that writes – something Jacques Derrida found quite remarkable – would end in 1975–76 with Joyce? Lacan Reading Joyce will be of great interest to professional and academic readers in the respective fields of Lacan and Joyce studies, including psychoanalysts in practice and training, as well as researchers and students in psychoanalytic and modern literary studies.

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce’s writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce’s works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce’s innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce’s writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce’s lesser-known works—critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections—to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Joyce contains several revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce's politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. This Companion gathers an international team of leading scholars who shed light on Joyce's work and life. The contributions are informative, stimulating and full of rich and accessible insights which will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. The Companion's reading lists and extended bibliography offer readers the necessary tools for further informed exploration of Joyce studies. This volume is designed primarily as a students' reference work (although it is organised so that it can also be read from cover to cover), and will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Joyce for the new reader.

This is a detailed reader's guide to James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, voted the most important novel of the 20th century. The guide provides episode by episode an in depth explanation of the action and symbolism, including a description of the related books of Homer's Odyssey and the correspondences. This guide is designed to give the user the keys to the kingdom of one of the wonders of Western civilization. The non-academic author, a retired lawyer and life long Joyce reader, brings new approaches to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's episodes and the novel as a whole. The scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly focused academics. The analysis elucidates Joyce's technique to mimic patterns in history and nature in his architecture of coherence. His medicine for the diseased spirit of our age is a custom blend of Jesus and Buddha, not as they are marketed by institutional religions, but as they lived their lives as humans. Joyce's god is more possibilities in life and art, and this guide will do that for you.

This volume is devoted to translations of some of the most significant criticism of James Joyce to have appeared in French journals over the last twenty, years. Joyce has been a great stimulus for new modes of theoretical and critical inquiry in France, which have in turn exerted a profound influence on the intellectual climate both in the UK and in North America. In their shared preoccupations with the mechanisms of textuality and the implications thereof for the writing-and-reading subject, all the contributors to this volume, who include Hélène Cixous, Jacques Aubert, JeanMichel Rabaté, André Topia and Jacques Derrida, form part of the movement away from the structuralism that dominated intellectual discussion in the 1960s to what is now called (though not in France itself), 'post-structuralism'.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

This book presents for the first time a collective examination of the issue of audience in relation to Joyce’s work and the cultural moments of its reception. While many of the essays gathered in this volume are concerned with particular readers and readings of Joyce’s work, they all, individually and generally, gesture at something broader than a specific act of reception. Joyce’s Audiences is an important narrative of the cultural receptions of Joyce but it is also an exploration of the author’s own fascination with audiences, reflecting a wider concern with reading and interpretation in general. Twelve essays by an international cast of Joyce critics deal with: the censorship and promotion of Ulysses; the ‘plain reader’ in modernism; Richard Ellmann’s influence on Joyce’s reputation; the implied audiences of Stephen Hero and Portrait; Borges’s relation with Joyce; the study of Joyce in Taiwan; the promotion of Joyce in the U.S.; the complaint that there is insufficient time to read Joyce’s work; the revisions to “Work in Progress” that respond to specific reviews; strategies of critical interpretation; Joyce and feminism; and the ‘belated’ readings of post-structuralism.