1st Edition
Making Space in the Works of James Joyce
James Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.
Introduction: Making Space. Valérie Bénéjam 1. Space in Finnegans Wake: An Archaeology. John Bishop 2. Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. André Topia 3. The Acoustic Space of Ulysses. Valérie Bénéjam 4. Text and the City: Joyce, Dublin and Colonial Modernity. Luke Gibbons 5. Gabriel’s Re-Mapping of Dublin: The Fabricated Cityscape of "The Dead". Liam Lanigan 6. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin. Michael Rubenstein 7. Disorienting Dublin. Eric Bulson 8. The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake. Laurent Milesi 9. Joyce the Post. David Spurr 10. Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’: The Echo of Motifs in James Joyce’s Literary Landscape. Katherine O’Callaghan 11.The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses. Sam Slote 12. Writing Space. Daniel Ferrer
Biography
Valérie Bénéjam is Maître de Conférences in English literature at the Université de Nantes. She wrote her PhD under the supervision of Jean-Michel Rabaté at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, and has written numerous articles on Joyce. She is currently completing a book-length study of Ulysses entitled All About Molly, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.
John Bishop is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in 20th-century British and American literature. In addition to having written numerous articles on Joyce, he is the author of a study of Finnegans Wake that has become a classic of Joyce criticism, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986). He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.
"Making Space in the Works of James Joyce is every bit as assertive and sure-footed as its title. Those with interest in Joyce's numerous geographies will want to make a space for it on their shelf."- James Joyce Literary Supplement
