Joyce And The Early Freudians

"Outstanding, even spectacular. . . . Kimball shows beyond any doubt that Joyce had by 1922 read key texts by Freud, Jung, Rank, and other analysts, and that his immersion in these then comparatively obscure writings informed his artistic vision in Ulysses. She provides an indispensable roadmap to Joyce's encounter with psychoanalysis."--Peter L. Rudnytsky, Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts, University of Florida, and editor, American Imago "Expands our sense of how influence can work, and it is rich with fresh insights into Joyce."--Sheldon Brivic, Temple University Joyce and the Early Freudians explores Joyce's interaction with psychoanalytic literature available to him before the publication of Ulysses in 1922. It is not a psychoanalytic reading of Joyce but rather a book that draws parallels between these works and Joyce's own writing and examines how Joyce was affected by the Zeitgeist of the psychoanalytic movement. Jean Kimball begins with a close but expansive discussion of the three psychoanalytic texts that Joyce purchased in Trieste before he moved to Zurich in 1915: Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, Jung's intensely Freudian essay on the father's significance in a person's life, and a German translation of Ernest Jones's original Hamlet and Oedipus essay. She follows with a discussion of the remarkable collection of psychoanalytic literature available at the Zentralbibliothek during Joyce's residence in Zurich, including an analysis of previously untranslated journal articles especially relevant to the Blooms and their marriage--articles that, because they relate to perversions, suggest a psychoanalytic base for Bloom's sexual oddities. Through close reading, the study traces textual parallels and verbal echoes from the psychoanalytic writings in A Portrait of the Artist and, to a much greater extent, in Ulysses. Kimball also gives close attention to the unique way in which Joyce makes use of allusions, often combining psychoanalytic traces with classical ones to add density to his work, thus strengthening her case for a textual connection between Joyce and Freud, two towering figures of the 20th century. Drawing from early psychoanalytic texts in a manner uniquely his own, Joyce has set up echoes in Ulysses that touch all the major characters of the novel. Jean Kimball is an adjunct associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa.

From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain. Despite Joyce's deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, Thurston shows that Jacques Lacan's response to Joyce goes beyond the 'application' of theory: rather than diagnosing Joyce's writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively builds on Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. This study should be essential reading for all students of Joyce, literary theory and psychoanalysis.

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.

Each of James Joyce's major works appeared in a year defined by armed conflict in Ireland or continental Europe: Dubliners in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the same year as the 1916 Easter Rising; Ulysses in February 1922, two months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a few months before the outbreak of the Irish Civil War; and Finnegans Wake in 1939, as Joyce complained that the German army's westward advances upstaged the novel's release. In Joyce and Militarism, Greg Winston considers these masterworks in light of the longstanding shadows that military culture and ideology cast over the society in which the writer lived and wrote. The first book-length study of its kind, this articulate volume offers original and interesting insights into Joyce's response to the military presence in everything from education and athletics to prostitution and public space.

"An eminently insightful and informative study of a single story, as well as a profound exploration of Joyce's position within his own historical moment and its most urgent philosophical and religious questions."--James Joyce Quarterly "One of the more intellectually capacious, wide-ranging studies on Joyce and his work to emerge in some time. . . . Owens's book is among the finest studies of Dubliners ever written as well as among the best--most provocative, revealing, and useful--critical works on Joyce to be published in some time."--Philological Quarterly "While Owens has captured the breadth of subjects that a casebook would offer, he balances his readings with a great deal of focused and specific close reading. . . . This book is an excellent companion for reading 'A Painful Case' and would be essential reading for anyone engaging in an in-depth study of Dubliners."--James Joyce Literary Supplement "Inspires awe, admiration, and wonder. . . . There is something new for every Joyce student and scholar to learn from Owens's thorough research."--English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 In order to demonstrate that one story from the Dubliners is not only a turning point in that book but also a microcosm of a wide range of important Joycean influences and preoccupations, Cóilín Owens examines the dense intertextuality of "A Painful Case." Assuming the position of the ideal contemporary Irish reader that Joyce might have anticipated, Owens argues that the main character, James Duffy, is a "spoiled priest," emotionally arrested by his guilt at having rejected the call to the priesthood. Duffy's intellectual life thereafter progresses through German idealism to eventual nihilism. The contrast of nihilist thought and Christian belief is Owens's main focus, and he demonstrates how this dichotomy is evident at various points in the life of James Duffy. From this springboard, Owens constructs a larger discussion of Joyce's cultural influences, including Schopenhauer, Wagner, Tolstoy, and others. He considers many other complex interrelationships that inform Joyce's text--theology, philosophy, music, opera, literary history, Irish cultural history, and Joyce's own poetry--and offers detailed elucidations informed by historical, geographical, linguistic, and biographical information.

To many, James Joyce is simply the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. Scholars have pored over every minutia of his public and private life from utility bills to deeply personal letters in search of new insights into his life and work. Yet, for the most part, they have paid scant attention to the two volumes of poetry he published. The nine contributors to The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsideredconvincingly challenge the critical consensus that Joyce’s poetry is inferior to his prose. They reveal how his poems provide entries into Joyce's most personal and intimate thoughts and ideas. They also demonstrate that Joyce's poetic explorations--of the nature of knowledge, sexual intimacy, the changing quality of love, the relations between writing and music, and the religious dimensions of the human experience--were fundamental to his development as a writer of prose. This exciting new work is sure to spark new interest in Joyce's poetry, and will become an essential and indispensable resource for students and scholars of his life and work.

James Joyce left Ireland in 1904 in self-imposed exile. Though he never permanently returned to Dublin, he continued to characterize the city in his prose throughout the rest of his life. This volume elucidates the ways Joyce wrote about his homeland with conflicting bitterness and affection—a common ambivalence in expatriate authors, whose time in exile tends to shape their creative approach to the world. Yet this duality has not been explored in Joyce’s work until now. The first book to read Joyce’s writing through the lens of exile studies, James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination challenges the tendency of scholars to stress the writer’s negative view of Ireland. Instead, it showcases the often-overlooked range of emotional attitudes imbuing Joyce’s work and produces a fuller understanding of Joyce’s canon.