Ironies of Ulysses

Ironies of Ulysses PDF Author: David G. Wright
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780389209737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book brings a new perspective to the study of Joyce's great novel. The author argues the case for employing the concept of irony as an explicatory tool in the study of Ulyssesóand indeed of the whole Joycean canon. Moreover he uses modern critical theory to enlarge our understanding of irony itself and to suggest how such theory has an appropriate object of attention in Joyce. Wright defines irony as "the use of a 'false' textual surface to direct a reader's attention towards initially concealed premises or implications". Thus an author lays a partly false trail, but one which usually leads towards a more authenthic or appropriate understanding of the subject under discussion. Joyce's work is full of this kind of semantic counterpoint. Indeed, it is essential to his whole comic method. Both Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses are full of ironic contrasts between the desire for order, certainty and stability on the one hand and random meetings and perverse associations. The author argues that Joyce's other favorite techniques of ambiguity and punning are so closely related to that of irony that all three may legitimately be considered as a unity, specially formed and deployed by Joyce in his mature work.; Contents: Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Local Ironies; Single-Episode Ironies; Inter-Episode Ironies; Ironies from Early Joyce; Ironies from Homer to Shakespeare; Bibliography; Index.

Ironies of Ulysses

Ironies of Ulysses PDF Author: David G. Wright
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780389209737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book brings a new perspective to the study of Joyce's great novel. The author argues the case for employing the concept of irony as an explicatory tool in the study of Ulyssesóand indeed of the whole Joycean canon. Moreover he uses modern critical theory to enlarge our understanding of irony itself and to suggest how such theory has an appropriate object of attention in Joyce. Wright defines irony as "the use of a 'false' textual surface to direct a reader's attention towards initially concealed premises or implications". Thus an author lays a partly false trail, but one which usually leads towards a more authenthic or appropriate understanding of the subject under discussion. Joyce's work is full of this kind of semantic counterpoint. Indeed, it is essential to his whole comic method. Both Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses are full of ironic contrasts between the desire for order, certainty and stability on the one hand and random meetings and perverse associations. The author argues that Joyce's other favorite techniques of ambiguity and punning are so closely related to that of irony that all three may legitimately be considered as a unity, specially formed and deployed by Joyce in his mature work.; Contents: Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Local Ironies; Single-Episode Ironies; Inter-Episode Ironies; Ironies from Early Joyce; Ironies from Homer to Shakespeare; Bibliography; Index.

James Joyce's Negations

James Joyce's Negations PDF Author: Brian Cosgrove
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The main purpose of this book is to validate a reading of Joyce in negative terms. Central to the enquiry is an examination of the roles of irony and of indeterminacy. Irony, interpreted in metaphysical rather than merely rhetorical terms, is envisaged as deriving from two separate if related orientations, one associated with Friedrich Schlegel, the other with Gustave Flaubert. Insofar as Joyce's work (including "Ulysses") owes more to the latter than the former, it forgoes the genial humour central to Schlegel's theories, and embraces instead the ironic detachment and formal control of a Flaubertian perspective. Such irony (which entails a suspicion of sentiment and a related dehumanisation of character, as in some of the stories in Dubliners) becomes normative in Joyce, and along with a similarly deflationary parody pervades "Ulysses". In addition, a persistent indeterminacy is established as early as 'The Dead', so that it becomes impossible in that story to adjudicate between not just contradictory but mutually exclusive interpretations. Such indeterminacy is pushed to further extremes in "Ulysses", with its notorious proliferation of narrative perspectives.As a corollary to the work's encyclopaedic inclusiveness and quotidian particularism, every detail tends to assume the same significance as every other; the consequence being that (in Gyorgy Lukacs' famous formulation) we lose all sense of any 'hierarchy of meaning'. From that it is but a step to Franco Moretti's assessment that in "Ulysses" everyday existence remains 'inert, opaque - meaningless', and that in fact the whole point is to represent the meaningless precisely 'as meaningless'. Indeterminacy, in effect, ushers in the possibility of nihilism. The analysis of "Ulysses" culminates with the attempt (unavailing in both cases) to discover in either Bloom or Molly a genuine source of countervailing affirmation. The study concludes with a brief consideration of the polysemic vocabulary of "Finnegans Wake" as a logical extrapolation of the poetics of indeterminacy.

Ulysses

Ulysses PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Most Dangerous Book

The Most Dangerous Book PDF Author: Kevin Birmingham
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143127543
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.

Re Joyce

Re Joyce PDF Author: Anthony Burgess
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393004458
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Commentary on Joyce for the average reader.

Ironies of Faith

Ironies of Faith PDF Author: Anthony Esolen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516234
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
In Ironies of Faith, celebrated Dante scholar and translator Anthony Esolen provides a profound meditation upon the use and place of irony in Christian art and in the Christian life. Beginning with an extended analysis of irony as an essentially dramatic device, Esolen explores those manifestations of irony that appear prominently in Christian thinking and art: ironies of time (for Christians believe in divine Providence, but live in a world whose moments pass away); ironies of power (for Christians believe in an almighty God who took on human flesh, and whose "weakness" is stronger than our greatest enemy, death); ironies of love (for man seldom knows whom to love, or how, or even whom it is that in the depths of his heart he loves best); and the figure of the Child (for Christians ever hear the warning voice of their Savior, who says that unless we become like unto one of these little ones, we shall not enter the Kingdom of God). Esolen's finely wrought study draws from Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Mauriac, Milton Herbert, Hopkins, and Dostoyevsky, among others, including the anonymous author of the medieval poem Pearl. Such authors, Anthony Esolen believes, teach us that the last laugh is on the world, because that grim old world, taking itself so seriously that even its laughter is a sneer, will finally - despite its proud resistance - be redeemed. That is the ultimate irony of faith. Readers who treasure the Christian literary tradition should not miss this illuminating book.

A Companion to James Joyce

A Companion to James Joyce PDF Author: Richard Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444342940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A Companion to James Joyce offers a unique composite overview and analysis of Joyce's writing, his global image, and his growing impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Brings together 25 newly-commissioned essays by some of the top scholars in the field Explores Joyce's distinctive cultural place in Irish, British and European modernism and the growing impact of his work elsewhere in the world A comprehensive and timely Companion to current debates and possible areas of future development in Joyce studies Offers new critical readings of several of Joyce's works, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses

Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation

Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation PDF Author: Vivian Heller
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Modernism has long been seen as either a symptom of decadence or a sign of emancipation. Vivian Heller argues that Joyce's writing cannot be categorized as either decadent or emancipatory because it is predicated on the dialectical intimacy of these two terms. Heller relies on Joyce's changing use of epiphany to trace the arc of his development, focusing on the negative epiphanies of Dubliners, the relativistic epiphanies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the retrospective epiphanies of Ulysses.

The Dialect of the Tribe

The Dialect of the Tribe PDF Author: Margery Sabin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195364775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The bold careers of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett--writers with profoundly unsettled cultural identities--spark Margery Sabin's investigation of values carried through inherited forms of speech. The Dialect of the Tribe offers fresh readings of such great novels as The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, Ulysses, and the Beckett trilogy which illustrate how complex attitudes toward the speech forms of language inform the most varied social, psychological, and aesthetic structures in modern fiction. Sabin explores the powerful tension in these writers between appreciation for the resources of common speech in English and contrary longings for a freedom associated with abstraction, system, and foreign or private language. Her own critical procedures transcend restrictive and reductive polarizations, as she lucidly analyzes the biases of both the Anglo-American critical tradition and the challenge to that tradition in French literary theory and practice. Written in a jargon-free, accessible style, The Dialect of the Tribe argues that the ambiguous cultural positions of the great modern novelists in English emerge as a major source of their strength--the rich traditions of the English language give enlivening power to writers also remarkable for their drive toward radical independence and skepticism.

Irony's Edge

Irony's Edge PDF Author: Linda Hutcheon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134937547
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.