Joyce Bakhtin And Popular Literature

The sheer mass of allusion to popular literature in the writings of James Joyce is daunting. Using theories developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, R. B. Kershner analyzes how Joyce made use of popular literature in such early works as Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. Kershner also examines Joyce's use of rhetoric, the relationship between narrator and protagonist, and the interplay of voices, whether personal, literary, or subliterary, in Joyce's writing. In pointing out the prolific allusions in Joyce to newspapers, children's books, popular novels, and even pornography, Kershner shows how each of these contributes to the structures of consciousness of Joyce's various characters, all of whom write and rewrite themselves in terms of the texts they read in their youth. He also investigates the intertextual role of many popular books to which Joyce alludes in his writings and letters, or which he owned -- some well known, others now obscure. Kershner presents Joyce as a writer with a high degrees of social consciousness, whose writings highlight the conflicting ideologies of the Irish bourgeoisie. In exploring the social dimension of Joyce's writing, he calls upon such important contemporary thinkers as Jameston, Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan in addition to Bakhtin. Joyce's literary response to his historical situation was not polemical, Kershner argues, but, in Bakhtin's terms, dialogical: his writings represent an unremitting dialogue with the discordant but powerful voices of his day, many inaudible to us now. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature places Joyce within the social and intellectual context of his time. Through stylistic, social, and ideological analysis, Kersner gives us a fuller grasp of the the complexity of Joyce's earlier writings.

Illuminates James Joyce's relationship to his literary predecessors in new and important ways

The essays gathered in Joyce in Progress are the fruit of the First Annual Graduate Conference in Joyce Studies held at the Università Roma Tre in February 2008, and organized by the Italian James Joyce Foundation. They are a testament to the enduring fascination of Joyce's writings and the ongoing liveliness of debate about the writer and his works and contexts. There is a wide array of genuine research on show here, which looks at Joyce from a variety of angles, focusing on his deeply complex autobiographical fiction through genetic studies, post-colonial studies, eco-criticism and intertextual and multi-modal approaches. This volume offers ground-breaking multi-disciplinary readings and usefully connects Joyce’s work with that of contemporary writers, rivals, followers, and successors.

Eleven essays that open tantalizing questions about Joyce and history

Ulysses as a touchstone for generating provacative ideas for innovation in teaching.

The first sustained analysis of the place of homoeroticism in Joyce's cultural politics

Enigmatic, vivid, and terse, James Joyce’s Dubliners continues both to puzzle and to compel its readers. This collection of essays by thirty contributors from seven countries presents a revolutionary view of Joyce’s technique and draws out its surprisingly contemporary implications by beginning with a single unusual premise: that meaning in Joyce’s fiction is a product of engaged interaction between two or more people. Meaning is not dispensed by the author; rather, it is actively negotiated between involved and curious readers through the medium of a shared text. Here, pairs of experts on Joyce’s work produce meaning beyond the text by arguing over it, challenging one another through it, and illuminating it with relevant facts about language, history, and culture. The result is not an authoritative interpretation of Joyce’s collection of stories but an animated set of dialogues about Dubliners designed to draw the reader into its lively discussions.

It might reasonably be asked what the connection is between Francoises malapropisms in Proust and the erudite allusions of Stephens interior monologue in Joyce. Tribout-Joseph argues that they are indeed interrelated. Proust and Joyce are exemplary of Modernisms reconciliation of high literature with popular voices. Both writers explore the process of incorporation, the interface between speech and narrative. Fragments of discourse are taken from diverse sources and reoriented within new contexts. Proposed here are interconnected close readings of socio-political debate, body talk, listening processes, silences, intertextual echoes, cliche, register, conflated voices, chatter, gossip, eavesdropping, internalized debate, and misunderstandings which allow for a new configuration of the authors to emerge.