Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In this provocative study, distinguished scholar Christine Froula argues that James Joyce used his artist-figures' suffering, transgressions, resistance, masquerade, parody, creativity, and play to turn the perversity often laid at his door into a daring critique of his culture. A departure from earlier feminist views of Joyce as misogynist, patriarchal, masochistic, or an inventor of "ecriture feminine, Modernism's Body" allies Joyce's arduous effort to translate his culture's unconscious knowledge into consciousness and conscience with the revolutionary energies of feminism and psychoanalysis.
Froula contends that Joyce retrieves from repression certain psychodynamics of masculinity that Freud and Lacan leave buried -- particularly the profound and far-reaching effects of the son's early identification with the mother. Rethinking Lacan's view of Joyce as a cultural "symptom," she shows how Joyce fashions deliberately symptomatic performances of himself as Daedalus, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, Shakespeare, Penelope, and other Western icons and parlays them into a powerful diagnosis of social and cultural institutions.
At once urgently critical and deeply sympathetic to its subject, "Modernism's Body" puts Joyce's radical analysis of masculinity in challenging dialogue with psychoanalysis, feminism, and narrative theory. Its tour-de-force interpretations show how Joyce probes the authority over sexuality and gender wielded by church and state, the marriage system, Nighttown's underworld of phantasmic mother/whores, and the symbolic estates of arts and letters as he excavates the collective conscience to forge it anew.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-304) and index.