Occult Joyce

Ulysses is in many ways an occult text, in that it deliberately hides meanings and significances from sight, and compels the reader to unveil its secrets by reading it backwards, from deceiving surfaces to underlying truths. To discuss the occult in Joyce is to analyse “the hidden” in the text. Ulysses is a “human” book. Its most profound meanings are encrypted beneath the surface of its “body.” To discover what’s concealed behind it implies an effort of anthropological archaeology. Accordingly, readers become really interpreters of the occult. Only by following the traces and signs left on the textual surface will they eventually dig out what lies dormant beneath. Joyce was extremely well-read in the occult. The variety of texts on the subject he possessed shows that his position was very eclectic, as if the occult were a kind of amalgam of different traditions, all marked by the signature of secrecy. In his own view, theosophy, mysticism, magic, spiritism, and the so-called occult science blend together to form a cluster of obscure erudition where he finds provocative ideas, helpful in building up his own cryptic system. To read Ulysses hermetically is also a way to show that the act of reading itself is always an experiment. The good thing about readings is that they are always provisional. Reading as a creative process implies the awareness that one will always be quite uncertain as to what lies hidden behind those concatenations of syllables and words we call texts. Interpretation is in fact a mark of our freedom, and all original readings are always subversive and provocative. Criticism to some extent implies often some kind of a subversive attitude, and the game of literature is a useful working ground for attempting to change its possible worlds. To see through surface inanity, in Ulysses, helps us understand that to read is often an act of revolt and resistance to past authoritative interpretations. Excavating the occult in Joyce’s masterpiece is a way to face more canonical readings that preferred not to acknowledge fully the author’s fondness for, and deep knowledge of, the subject. "This is a book which has the gift of explanation rather than simplification - and it will help to move Joyce Studies into new and exciting areas of investigation." Prof. Declan Kiberd, UCD Dublin School of English and Drama "Dr. Terrinoni's work is a very well researched and penetrating study of the occult and hidden in 'Ulysses' finding connections and meanings ignored or misunderstood by other scholars. It is a real contribution to Joyce Studies." Prof. Clive Bloom, Middlesex University

Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Joséphin Péladan and the artist Jan Švankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

(series copy)These encyclopedic companions are browsable, invaluable individual guides to authors and their works. Useful for students, but written with the general reader in mind, they are clear, concise, accessible, and supply the basic cultural, historical, biographical and critical information so crucial toan appreciation and enjoyment of the primary works. Each is arranged in an A-Z fashion and presents and explains the terms, people, places, and concepts encountered in the literary worlds of James Joyce, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.As a keen explorer of the mundane material of everyday life, James Joyce ranks high in the canon of modernist writers. He is arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth-century, and may be the most read, studied, and taught of all modern writers. The James Joyce A-Z is the ideal companionto Joyce's life and work. Over 800 concise entries relating to all aspects of Joyce are gathered here in one easy-to-use volume of impressive scope.

While postcolonial studies has contributed much to our understanding of Irish modernism, it has also encouraged less-than-accurate portrayals of Joyce and Yeats as polar opposites: Yeats as the inventor of Irish mystique and Joyce as its relentless demythologiser. Alistair Cormack's complex study provides a corrective to these misleading characterisations by analysing the tools Yeats and Joyce themselves used to challenge representation in the postcolonial era. Despite their very different histories, Cormack suggests, these two writers can be seen as allies in their insistence on the heresy of the imagination. Reinvigorating and politicising the history of ideas as a powerful medium for studying literature, he shows that Joyce and Yeats independently challenged a linearity and materialism they identified with empire. Both celebrated Ireland as destabilising the accepted forms of thought and the accepted means of narrating the nation. Thus, 'unreadable' modernist works such as Finnegans Wake and A Vision must be understood as attempts to reconceptualise history in a literally postcolonial period.

Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

In Transcultural Joyce, a team of leading international scholars assess the afterlife of James Joyce and his writings within a multinational context. How does Joyce haunt the works of later writers in diverse literary traditions? How well does he translate from one culture and language to another? This book consider Joyce's reincarnations in texts from Latin America, Europe, and South Asia. Transcultural Joyce provides a fresh theoretical examination of conventional notions such as 'influence' and 'translation' and asks how Joyce is imported across particular cultural boundaries. As a canonical modernist and colonial subject, Joyce inhabits a borderline position that complicates his reception and revision by later writers. This book accounts for his cultural place as specifically Irish and more postcolonial than previous studies have acknowledged. Scholars and translators of Joyce also consider the formidable task of translating his work for a global audience.

All fifteen essays in this collection are concerned with the primacy of the novelistic aspects of Ulysses and how it achieves its meanings. Together they seek to redress the tendency of some recent critics to regard Ulysses as a compendium of techniques or a treatise.