The Disappointed Bridge

This original study is the first major critical appraisal of Ireland’s post-colonial experience in relation to that of other emergent nations. The parallels between Ireland, India, Latin America, Africa and Europe establish bridges in literary and musical contexts which offer a unique insight into independence and freedom, and the ways in which they are articulated by emergent nations. They explore the master-servant relationship, the functions of narrative, and the concepts of nationalism, map-making, exile, schizophrenia, hybridity, magical realism and disillusion. The author offers many incisive answers to the question: What happens to an emerging nation after it has emerged?

The voice traverses Beckett’s work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice’s multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject’s vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett’s work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation.

From the author of USA Today bestseller The Girl With All the Gifts, a terrifying new novel set in the same post-apocalyptic world. Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy. The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world. To where the monsters lived.

"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.

The first edition (now out of print) grew out of a conference held in Vermont, May-June 1984; the second includes minor changes and one important new document. The subject is the thinking and influence of William Miller whose prediction of the second coming of Christ and the end of the world "about the year 1843" fostered several new religious movements, including Seventh-day Adventists. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as "subject matter" or "content," but as "form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forces--technology, empire, urbanization--off the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.

At Fault is an exhilarating celebration of risk-taking in the work of James Joyce. Esteemed Joyce scholar and teacher Sebastian Knowles critiques the state of the modern American university, denouncing what he sees as an accelerating trend of corporatization that is repressing discussions of controversial ideas and texts in the classroom. Arguing that Joyce offers the antidote to risk-averse attitudes in higher education, he shows how the modernist writer models an openness to being "at fault" that should be central to the academic enterprise. Knowles describes Joyce's writing style as an "outlaw language" imbued with the possibility and acknowledgment of failure. He demonstrates that Joyce's texts and characters display a drive to explore the boundaries of experience, to move outward in a centrifugal pattern, to defy delimitation. Knowles further highlights the expansiveness of Joyce’s world by engaging a diverse range of topics, including Jumbo the elephant as a symbol of imperialism, the gramophone as a representation of the machine age, solfège and live music performance in the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, Joyce's jokes and the neurology of humor, and inventive ways of reading and teaching Finnegans Wake. Contending that error is the central theme in all of Joyce's work, Knowles argues that the freedom to challenge boundaries and make mistakes is essential to an effective learning environment. Energetic and delightfully erudite, and offering insights drawn from over thirty years of classroom experience, Knowles inspires readers with the infinite possibilities of free human thought exemplified by Joyce's writing. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles