Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain Reading Against the Grain Read

By Kevin J.H. Dettmar

Book Overview

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James 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-Fran ois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-postmodernist 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.

In short, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism explores what happens when the extra-literary pronouncements of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, as well as Joyce's early critics, are set aside and a new, "unauthorized" Joyce is allowed to appear. This postmodern Joyce, more willful and less easily compartmentalized, stands as a counterpoint to the modernist Joyce who has perhaps become too familiar.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 029915064X
• ISBN13: 9780299150648
• Release Date: July 1996
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Treatment

The previous reviewer who takes exception to this book both (a) misreads Joyce (relying on Stephen D. in Portrait as encompassing the attitudes of a mature Joyce--remember the disclaimer "as a Young Man") and (b) misreads postmodernism completely. This book, a rare lenghty treatment of this subject in Joyce studies provides fantastically innovative work for Dubliners ("epiphony" shall certainly live on in Joyce scholarship) and offers compelling arguments for a new celebration of Ulysses and Dubliners in a postmodern/poststructural vein (where others tend to be too heavily focused on Finnegans Wake).

Wow!

Kevin Dettmar is a genius! I have never enjoyed a book so thoroughly as The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. I have already read it six times, I simply can't put it down! I am buying a copy for everyone at work for Christmas, it makes a great gift, so try it. I think that it should be required for every person in this world to read this wonderful, amazing book.