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This chapter explores how James Joyce transvalues epic, the novel, and Ireland in tandem through an encyclopaedic multi-perspectivalism. Writers of the Irish Literary Revival engaged within a variety of genres but they especially privileged drama and poetry as the vehicles for a recrudescence of an authentic Irish identity. As a counter to this, Joyce’s writings implicitly and explicitly make the case that the kind of transvaluation requisite to an Irish Revival could be better accommodated through the genre of the novel, in that only the novel was sufficiently malleable and protean to encompass the heterogeneities that were often suppressed or ignored amongst various discordant factions of the Revival. This chapter shows how in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce exults in the heteroglossia afforded by the novel by making it a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives and for languages that are mixed and multiple.

This essay looks at what James Joyce’s Ulysses has to say about the nature of fiction. Precisely because Joyce worked very hard to represent Dublin as accurately and meticulously as possible, Ulysses blurs an easy division between fact and fiction. This essay considers how one can discuss fictional entities in ways that make sense. Rather than settle upon a “possible worlds” approach to considering fiction, this essay looks at the advantages and disadvantages of what can be called endorsement: judging the truth of a statement about a fiction is simply a matter of determining whether the fiction endorses that statement. Instead of multiple (even infinite) possible worlds, a work of fiction occasions multiple possible endorsements precisely because any work of fiction is inherently incomplete and thus requires the initiatives of its readers to fill in its manifold gaps.

With its post-Babelian language, the Wake is, or can be seen to be, at least in part, about translation. Starting from Derrida’s essay on the Wake, the first part of the paper will examine ...

In March 2006 the National Library of Ireland acquired a small but significant tranche of Joyce manuscripts that hailed from the earliest phases of the composition and conceptualization of Finnegans Wake. The manuscripts fit within the already well-known series of Irish-themed vignettes that Joyce wrote in 1923 (Tristan and Isolde, Roderick O’Conor, St Patrick, St Kevin). Most of the new drafts were completely unanticipated and thus their appearance forced significant revisions upon our under...

A novel by James Joyce, written between 1914 and 1922, serialized from 1918–1920, and published in book form (to much controversy) in 1922. With T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, both also published in 1922, Ulysses helps establish 1922 as the peak year of Anglo-American Modernism. It is among the most stylistically diverse and boldly experimental English prose works of the twentieth century. Ulysses takes place over the course of one single day, June 16, 1904 (now known as Bloomsday, after its central character Leopold Bloom). It consists of 18 chapters (or episodes as Joyce called them), each one covering no more than one hour. Each episode has a specific style, although the styles of most of the earlier episodes are largely similar. Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1922, although it began life in 1906 as a quickly abandoned short story for Dubliners. Joyce’s compositional practice was largely one of revision and addition: Joyce signed off the final revisions for Ulysses on January 30, 1922, days before its publication. Episodes from Ulysses were serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. Serialization was halted after the thirteenth episode ("Nausicaa") occasioned a legal action over obscenity brought on by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice (four episodes were serialized by The Egoist, but fears of prosecution prevented a fuller serialization). Joyce’s refusal to make any concessions towards publishing Ulysses in a climate where it was liable to be judged obscene led to its being published by Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris.

The ‘Penelope’ episode of Ulysses and the concluding pages of How It Is—two texts bereft of punctuation—are peppered with yeses. In ‘Penelope’, these yeses take the force of punctuation by suggesting logical and syntactic connections between the fragmentary phrases they interpose upon. Through the weight of their accumulation they also suggest—as per Derrida’s argument in ‘Ulysses gramophone’—an affirmation of the very possibility of affirmation. However, such affirmation of affirmation necessarily includes a negative moment. In this, ‘Penelope’ is very close to The Unnamable in that both texts present us with multiple, incommensurable fragments of ratiocination that asymptotically tend towards a silence that never quite comes within the interval of speaking. My essay will argue how the yeses that conclude How It Is ambiguate or intertwine the categories of affirmation and negation and show how affirmation becomes coterminous with denial.

In this paper I examine the ramifications of doubling and repetition in Nabokov’s Lolita, with reference to Proustian notions of recollection, which are adumbrated in the novel at various occasions, such as Humbert’s claim to have written an academic paper titled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey.” I begin by tracing out the contours of what such an article might have been like and then I apply these points to a reading of Lolita.

In this essay, I look at Garryowen—the dog known to all men and a "bloody mangy mongrel" ( U 12.119-20)—in terms of hybridity and then examine how such an issue redounds to the question of the construction of national identity in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses . I begin by looking at Dr. James W. Redfield's Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Man and Animals , which considers national identity from an animalistic perspective. Ignoring any possibility of hybridity, Redfield unequivocally identifies the Irish with dogs. While Joyce was apparently ignorant of this work, his treatment of dogs in Ulysses functions as a corrective, of sorts, to Redfield's bizarre assertions in that it champions the hybrid and even the mongrel.

I will begin by asking a reasonably straightforward question: what is politics? What is the political? And, more precisely, what is the political in Finnegans Wake? With the word "political" I do not mean simply partisan differences of ideological affiliation, such as the differences between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael or the even more incommensurable differences between Lutte ouvriere, the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste and the Parti ouvrier independant. Rather, I would like to examine the ways in which Joyce diagnoses the manifold political inflections of a community: what makes a group of disparate individuals communal? What, in the Wake, is the vector or vectors between a self, many individual selves, and we ourselves? To be sure, Joyce is not primarily a political theorist, or, worse, a political scientist: he is not proposing a programmatic model to be followed in any practical sense. Rather, in Finnegans Wake he offers a critique and genealogy of the political in both its general and specific, historical aspects; Joyce is, to quote Spiro Agnew speaking in a dignified ventriloquy from William Safire, a "nattering nabob of negativism".Indeed, politics is born of negativism. To tease this point out, I would like to examine Aristotle's definition of politics. In the Politics and elsewhere Aristotle proclaimed that "man is by nature a political animal".1 The political is a necessary and innate condition of anthropology. The political character comes from the being of the human being. But, there is another dimension to the political character since Aristotle also claims that "the state is by nature prior to the family and to the individual since the whole is of necessity prior to the part".2 Because the polis is the natural antecedent, the political animal is also the animal domesticated by the polis. Therefore, the political animal is political because of both an innate biological condition and the structuring agency of the community in which he dwells. The polis is an inevitable extension of man's political inclination and, likewise, the polis expresses its constituent members as citizens. In this way, the polis and the political animal are mutually engendering or synergistic.In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle formulates man's political character differently. He argues that because man is not self-sufficient, he cannot be solitary and thus requires a family.3 Man's natural condition is one of limitation and this lack of self-sufficiency occasions the political inclination. Bloom intuits this point in "Lotus Eaters" whilst in All Hallows Church: "Not so lonely. In our confraternity" (u 5.363-64). The limitations of any one individual inspire a herd instinct for the purpose of survival. If the political instinct were merely a means of providing for the bare necessities for life, man's sociability would not extend beyond the immediate family. Aristotle makes this point in the Eudemian Ethics in a passage that unfortunately suffers a lacuna at a non-trivial place in the argument. Aristotle posits that man is both "a political but also a household-maintaining animal".4 He continues, "in the household first we have the sources and springs of friendship, of political organization, and of justice".5 Therefore the political instinct, the instinct to congregate and consociate collectively, is an extension of the survival-orientated herd instinct. As he puts in the Politics, "the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life".6 The political instinct extends the herd instinct towards the attainment of a good life. For Aristotle, the polis has one end, the good; thus it is monoteleological.Therefore, Aristotle defines the political inclination as an inter- and intracommunal force that allows for the continuation and propagation of both the community as a whole and of its constituent members; to take a collocation from "Oxen of the Sun", the political aims towards ensuring "proliferent continuance" (u 14. …

As the son of a profligate wastrel (and a bit of a wastrel himself were it not for his literary abilities), Joyce writes of money and debt with an obvious intimacy. Issues of money and debt inform his writing and, indeed, his writing practice. In "The Ondt and the Gracehoper", the avaricious Ondt chastises the wasteful Gracehoper for his rampant profligacy: "Flunkey Footle furloughed fool, writing off his phoney. But Conte Carme makes the melody that mints the money. Ad majorem l.s.d.1 Divi gloriam" (fw 418.02-4). Whereas the Gracehoper wastes, pines, and squanders, the Ondt makes the melody that makes money for the greater glory of ... pounds, shillings, and pence. Money is the arbitrator of meaning and the value of this Oneness is cold, hard cash. Money makes money ... of us all. Unlike the reckless Gracehoper, the Ondt invests and reaps the resultant rewards. What I would like to propose is that Joyce's notetaking and writing practice are not without affinities to the Ondt's prudent avarice, although they are also not untainted by a certain expenditure.Frank Budgen provides a rare first-hand account of Joyce's notetaking habits during the composition of Ulysses:As far as concerns the need for tablets [...] Joyce was never without them. And they were not library slips, but little writing blocks specially made for the waistcoat pocket. At intervals, alone or in conversation, seated or walking, one of these tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it at lightning speed as ear or memory served his turn. No one knew how all this material was given place in the completed patter of his work, but from time to time in Joyce's flat one caught glimpses of a few of those big orange-coloured envelopes that are one of the glories of Switzerland, and these I always took to be storehouses of building material. The method of making a multitude of criss-cross notes in pencil was a strange one for a man whose sight was never good.1Joyce is thus like Shem, a "malestimated notesnatcher" (fw 125.21-22), swiping and storing notes, hoarding material for possible, subsequent use. Only one of the small notebooks Budgen describes has survived, Buffalo V.A.2.a (originally catalogued as VIII.A.5). Luca Crispi writes:This notebook is unlike all the other extant Ulysses notebooks in that it is a 'first-order' notebook; that is, Joyce compiled it directly from the various sources he was reading. As such, this early notebook is different in kind from all the other extant Ulysses notebooks that are compilations of diverse notes, which Joyce re-sorted in new constellations in these extant notebooks.2Although this is the only extant first-order Ulysses notebook, there were many others; in a letter to Ettore Schmitz of January 1921 Joyce estimated that the briefcase containing his notes weighed almost 5 kg (Letters 1, 154). Collating Budgen's account with Crispi's analysis, we can see that Joyce's notetaking progressed through various discrete stages: notes taken directly from his reading would then be selected and copied into other notebooks, where they would be categorised under various headings (either by subject or by episode),3 and then these might be further re-copied and re-sorted into other notebooks or notesheets before eventually winding up in a draft of the text. Seen from a different perspective, Joyce mines his source-texts for lexical nuggets, which he immediately collects in a so-called first-order notebook, this material then circulates through various other notebooks before being eventually harvested into the text. The text of Ulysses reaps what Joyce sowed (and re-sowed) into his notes. Of course, not all collected material is harvested; much (if not most) of the material Joyce collected from his source texts never makes it to the final text. As a notetaker, Joyce is greedy and takes more than he needs. The process of re-sorting his notes across different notebooks is his means of winnowing out (and also, perhaps, figuring out) what he needs. …

I n 1925, the renowned French critic Louis Gillet wrote a fiercely negative review of Ulysses for the Revue des deux mondes. A few years later, he came to be somewhat embarrassed by this essay. He blamed his initial negativity on various factors, such as his incomplete knowledge of Joyce at the time and his excessive reliance upon Edmund Gosse's opinions, which he had solicited in a letter.1 In his review, Gillet derides Ulysses as a cruel, but hollow, joke. Joyce's way is the farceur's way and Ulysses is merely a childish joke levelled at the expense of an exalted literary tradition.