The Esoteric 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

This book is an original and well-informed survey of the whole of Joyce's work. It offers close readings of his early writings such as Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an extended examination of his masterpiece, Ulysses.

First published in 1966. By pursuing a group of cognate themes, the author relates major critical approaches to the fiction of James Joyce. One of the major issues explored is that of the existence of ‘symbols’ in his fiction, and of the quality of Joyce’s feelings shown through an examination of the extent of his human sympathies. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This set reissues 8 books on James Joyce originally published between 1966 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Joyce’s most respected works, including Finnegans Wake, Dubliners and Ulysses. As well as providing an in-depth analyses of Joyce’s work, this collection also looks at James Joyce in the context of the Modernist movement as a whole. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

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.

(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.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.