THE ILLICIT JOYCE OF POSTMODERNISM by Kevin J. H. Dettmar ( 9780299150600 )

Item Details

Title:

THE ILLICIT JOYCE OF POSTMODERNISM
READING AGAINST THE GRAIN

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£51.95
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ISBN 10:

0299150607

ISBN 13:

9780299150600

Publisher:

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Pub. date:

15 July, 1996

Pages:

292

Description:

The modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James Joyce - useful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book goes beyond those limits into postmodernism, where the possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce have yet to be found. Kevin Dettmar is the author "Marketing Modernisms".

Synopsis:

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading Joyce - useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found. Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-post-modernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work's ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts - the first constrained by the precious, would be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.

Illustrations:

2 line illustrations

Publication:

Imprint:

University of Wisconsin Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST LITERATURE AND CULTURE