Voices And Values In Joyce S Ulysses

"Few scholars can approach Ulysses armed with the breadth of knowledge and command of scholarship evident in Thornton's rich and humane reading of the novel. Voices and Values in Joyce's Ulysses is the most important study in many years of the relationship between Joyce's stylistic experiments and the values on which they are based."--Patrick A. McCarthy, University of Miami This book provides a clear, well-substantiated answer to a question that has vexed critics for decades: Why does Joyce employ a different style for each of the last ten episodes of Ulysses? Rejecting the commonly held position that this variety of styles is a reflection of Joyce's linguistic relativism, Weldon Thornton argues that Joyce's intention is to reveal and to highlight the limitations and distortions that these extravagantly disparate styles produce. Thornton further argues that it is in the style of the opening episodes--what Joyce called the "initial style"--that the reader will find the normative voice of the novel, the one Joyce labored mightily to create and which fulfills his underlying purposes in the novel. After grounding his epic in this "initial style," Joyce deploys an encyclopedia of contemporary modes and techniques, exposing how each in its turn inhibits or distorts our experience of the world. In every case, the fulcrum of Joyce's satire is a concern for his characters' (and his readers') fulfillment of their potential to understand what happens in their world. In the "Nausicaa" episode, for example, he reveals the pernicious effects of sentimental romance. In "Sirens" he satirizes the idea that music is the primary art. In "Circe" he demonstrates the distortion of experience that follows from the Freudian expressionistic literary mode. While the primary audience for Voices and Values in Joyce's Ulysses will be teachers, critics, and students concerned with the basic critical issues of this novel, it will also be of great interest to those concerned with the broader issues of modernism and modern literature in general. Weldon Thornton is William R. and Jeanne H. Jordan Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is author of several books, including The Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1994).

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.

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce’s writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce’s works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce’s innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce’s writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce’s lesser-known works—critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections—to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

This collection commemorates the centenary of decisive events in the history of international Modernism. The second decade of the twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary burst of creativity and inquiry which left an indelible mark in literature, music, and the visual arts, as well as in their respective theoretical frameworks. As with other moments of crisis, the period was exceptionally rich in innovation and experimentation. For literature and the arts, it was also a time of great clashes, both contextually, most obviously because authors were faced with the events of the Great War, and internally, through radical contestation of the aesthetic and intellectual legacies of the past. The passing of one hundred years provides an opportunity for homage, as well as critical assessment of intentions and accomplishments. The present volume brings together the work of scholars who focus on both early and late Modernism and its long-ranging cultural and literary reverberations, in order to widen the reader’s perspective of the significance of the modernist movement for contemporary art, theory and criticism. Contributions range from the Little Magazines and James Joyce to post-World War II theatre of the absurd; from literature in English to literature written in other languages, such as French and Portuguese.

Thornton takes a fresh look at important psychological and cultural issues in this novel, arguing that although it may be a classic text of literary modernism, it is a fundamentally antimodernist work. This comprehensive and thoughtful book provides readers with a new cultural critique and intellectual history of 'Portrait', which promises to become one of the major discussions of the novel.

It is often claimed that we know ourselves and the world through narratives. In this book, Robert D. Newman portrays narrative engagement as a process grounded in psychoanalytic theory to explain how readers (or listeners or viewers) manage to engage with specific narratives and derive from them a personal experience. Newman describes this psychodrama of narrative engagement as that of exile and return, an experience in which narrative becomes a type of homeland, beckoning and elusive, endlessly defining and disrupting the borders of a reader's identity. Within this paradigm, he considers a fascinating variety of narrative texts: from the Jim Jones episode in Guyana to Freud's repression of personal history in his story of Moses; from a surrealistic collage novel by Max Ernst to the horror films of Alfred Hitchcock; from the works of James Joyce, Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera, and D. M. Thomas to the tales of abjection in pornography. Transgressions of Reading is itself an engaging work, as interesting for its provocative readings of particular works as for its theoretical insights. It will appeal to readers from all fields in which narrative plays a crucial role, in the study of film and art, modern and contemporary literature, popular culture, and feminist, psychoanalytic, and reader response theory.

This book explores the writings of James Joyce from his early poetry and short stories to his final avant-garde work, Finnegans Wake. It examines not only the significance of the ordinary but the function of natural and urban spaces and the moods, voice, and language that give Joyce's works their widespread appeal.