Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Highly original and extremely rewarding. Essential for coming to a clearer sense of the forces informing Joyce's imaginative efforts."
—Michael Patrick Gillespie, Marquette University
Synopsis
Anthropology is by definition about "others," but in this volume the phrase refers not to members of observed cultures, but to "significant others" spouses, lovers, and others with whom anthropologists have deep relationships that are both personal and professional. The essays in this volume look at the roles of these spouses and partners of anthropologists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially their work as they accompanied the anthropologists in the field. Other relationships discussed include those between anthropologists and informants, mentors and students, cohorts and partners, and parents and children. The book closes with a look at gender roles in the field, demonstrated by the "marriage" in the late nineteenth century of the male Anthropological Society of Washington to the Women s Anthropological Society of America. Revealing relationships that were simultaneously deeply personal and professionally important, these essays bring a new depth of insight to the history of anthropology as a social science and human endeavor."
Synopsis
The Sensual Philosophy offers a richly illuminating reading of James Joyce's canon, placing his texts in the context of the medieval mystical tradition that had influenced and interested Joyce since his school days. In exploring Joyce's indebtedness to the artistic and theological culture of the Middle Ages, Colleen Jaurretche also identifies the origins of modernist aesthetics in medieval forms of representation.
Jaurretche follows the imprint of the "negative" mystical tradition—which seeks to surmount all human categories and sensations so as to encounter the divine—from its beginnings in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite through its culmination in the sixteenth-century writings of St. John of the Cross. Joyce sees these ideas, she notes, in the intellectual tradition of late Victorian and early Modern writers, such as William Blake, Walter Pater, Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. She traces the development of Joyce's mystical aesthetic through a critical examination of his novels, culminating in the supreme negative mystical aestheticism of Finnegans Wake.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-151) and index.
About the Author
Colleen Jaurretche is lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California–Los Angeles. She received her BA and PhD at UCLA.