Description: Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce's works--revolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and...
Brief description: Susan Stanford Friedman is Hilldale Professor and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies), Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction, and Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.
Review Quotes:
The collected essays in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Susan Stanford Friedman tells us in her introduction, explore the various ways that Joyce's work can be read as textual scenes of 'repression, disguised expression, and fragmentary return.' In the course of tracing the forms of these ongoing processes throughout the Joycean canon, the contributors cover a range of diverse topics, including the representations of the artist, Joyce's Irishness as it relates to discourses of race and racialism, subjectivity and desire, and the figurations of the maternal. The essays are united by a shared interest in psychoanalytic and/or poststructuralist arguments about the intriguing dynamics and variable relationships between interacting texts.
--Kimberly J. Devlin "James Joyce Quarterly"