The Cracked Lookingglass

There are basic problems, and if we can't solve them we should hold off on theorizing. To begin at the beginning, what was Father Flynn's "great wish" for the boy in "The Sisters"? The uncle thinks he knows, but is he right? Can we be sure? How? And how about the beginning and end of "An Encounter"? How do they fit together? What is the specific import to the boy in "Araby" of the shards of conversation between the salesgirl and the Britishers? Can we (or Eveline) be certain of Frank's motives in her story? If not, what relevance do they have? And how in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man do Stephen's use and understanding of art evolve? In what crucial respects do they fall short of the understanding a careful reader of the novel can attain? What in Ulysses does Buck Mulligan have in mind when he demands "twopence for a pint" (of what!)? And in what ways are Bloom's ruminations about things like "mity cheese" that "digests all but itself" and saltwater fish ("Why is it that [they] are not...") crucial to the novel? There are bigger questions. What roles do all the accidental occurrences play? Do they heighten or diminish causality and probability? What are the functions of allusion and stylistic experimentation? Is/are there any overriding significance/s to the whole? Is there a didactic component in Joyce's writing? If so, is the didactic element a flaw in his art? What is the relationship between art and instruction--in Joyce and in general? Is good didactic art a contradiction in terms? These latter questions are enticing, but to speculate, theorize, deconstruct, or decontextualize Joyce's works with regard to them without a firm understanding, and perhaps even answers to, the vital though sometimes seemingly trivial former questions is to abrogate critical responsibility and relinquish what one of the formative giants of the twentieth century has to say to us. When relevant, the former are almost always answerable, and the mundane answers, often surprising, are frequently crucial not only for answering the latter questions but for fresh insight into both Joyce's world and our own. By mapping routes to the revelations such mundane "facts" yield, The Cracked Lookingglass establishes a firm base for future interpretations of Joyce's stories from Dubliners through Ulysses. It approaches his works as "fictional histories," grounding its "examplary" readings in relationships among the underlying facts of Joyce's created worlds. The study presents both a method of inquiry and, as examples of its fruit, some of the ways in which the apparent undiscoverables of Joyce's fiction disclose new and indisputable insights into his characters and stories, and through them our world. The approach opens avenues of access to the depths of Dubliners; to the assessments of art, religion, and human relationships in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; to the necessitous underpinnings of Joyce's experimentation in Ulysses, the ground and justification of his uses of "psychocasual chance," the "mythical method," and the seemingly gratuitous stylistic experiments that mirror our lives and suggest new directions for them.

This comprehensive list of allusions found in James Joyce's modern classic, Ulysses, is in itself a classic and is a feat of literary scholarship of unprecedented magnitude. In brief, this book is a copiously annotated list of Joyce's allusions in such areas as literature, philosophy, theology, history, and the fine arts. So awesome an undertaking would not have been possible without the prior work of such persons as Stuart Gilbert, Joseph Prescott, William York Tindall, M.J.C. Hodgart, Mabel Worthington, and many others. But the present list is more than a compilation of previously discovered allusions, for it contains many allusions that have never been suggested before, as well as some that have only been partially or mistakenly identified in earlier publications. In preparing this work, the author has kept its usefulness to the reader foremost in mind. He often refreshed the reader's memory in concerning the context of an allusion, since its context, in one sense or another, is always the guide to its function in the novel. The entire list is fully cross-referenced and keyed by page and line to both the old and new Modern Library editions of Ulysses. In addition, the index is prepared in such a way that it indexes not only the List but also the novel itself. The purpose of allusion in a literary work is essentially the same as that of all other types of metaphor -- the development and revelation of character, structure, and theme -- and, when skillfully used, it does all of these simultaneously. Joyce's use of allusion is distinguished from that of other authors not by its purposes, but by its extent and thoroughness. Ulysses involves dozens of allusive contexts, all continually intersecting, modifying, and qualifying one another. Here again Joyce's uniqueness and complexity lie not in his themes or characters, nor in his basic methods of developing them, but in his accepting the challenge of an Olympian use of his chosen methods. The value of this volume to Joyce scholars and students is obvious; however, its usefulness to anyone who reads Ulysses is as great, if not greater. It can truly be the key to this difficult but rewarding novel.

In this collection, ten gifted literary artists capture the modern world in the looking glass of fantasy and thereby illuminate the startling realities of contemporary experience.

She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere' A tender story of devotion, resentment and ennui from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

One of the earliest, and still one of the most perceptive analyses of Katherine Anne Porter, it gives careful interpretation of the style and intent of Porter's work from 1935 through the publication and critical reception of Ship of Fools.

During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.

Fictions of Autonomy presents a revisionary account of aesthetic autonomy and transnational modernism with a range of readings that includes works by Wilde, Eliot, Joyce, Barnes, and Stevens alongside writings by theorists like Adorno and de Man.