The Varieties of Joycean Experience

By (author) Tim Conley

Publication date:

15 December 2020

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781785274596

The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce’s works. With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore such problems as the difficulties these books pose to categories and summaries and our understanding of Joyce’s composition methods. The book explores Joyce’s ambiguities around death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce’s works. The book concludes with an examination of the tricky problem: what makes an interpretation untenable, and why do Joyce’s works inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings?

Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Preface; 1. Categorical: “Meddlied Muddlingisms”: The Uncertain Avant- Gardes of Finnegans Wake; 2. Narratological: “Whole Only Holes Tied Together”: Joyce and the Paradox of Summary; 3. Compositional: Playing with Matches: The Wake Notebooks and Negative Correspondence; 4. Genetical: Revision Revisited; 5. Cerebral: “Cog It Out”: Joyce on the Brain; 6. Mythametical: Waking “for an Equality of Relations”; 7. Scatological: Mixplacing His Fauces; 8. Thanatological: “Don’t You Know He’s Dead?”: Postmortem Uncertainties; 9. Meteorological: Weathering the Wake : Barometric Readings of I.3; 10. Hysterical- Exegetical: Petitions Full of Pieces of Pottery; Bibliography; Index.

“In this superb collection of elegantly written essays, Tim Conley looks at Joyce’s texts through a variety of different perspectives in a clear and precise manner that takes Joyce’s whimsy seriously. Essential reading for all Joyceans.” — Sam Slote, Associate Professor, School of English, Trinity College Dublin