Synopses & Reviews
Review
“Claire A. Culleton’s
Names and Naming in Joyce is an immensely stimulating and engagingly readable work. Written with great verve, an engaging sense of humor, and an obviously impassioned interest in its subject, it demonstrates a confident mastery both of Joyce’s work and of the scholarship on Joyce, consolidating a great deal of scattered research and integrating it with its own original insights to advance a coherent, unexpectedly fresh, and compelling argument about the ways in which Joyce thought about, selected, and used names in his fiction. Almost every major critic of Joyce has somewhere passingly acknowledged Joyce’s fascination with names, but no one outside of this work has yet so systematically explored it.”—John Bishop, University of California, Berkeley
Synopsis
Vivacious, unconventional, candid, and straight, Helen Branson operated a gay bar in Los Angeles in the 1950s America s most anti-gay decade. After years of fending off drunken passes as an entertainer in cocktail bars, this divorced grandmother preferred the wit, variety, and fun she found among homosexual men. Enjoying their companionship and deploring their plight, she gave her gay friends a place to socialize. Though at the time California statutes prohibited homosexuals from gathering in bars, Helen s place was relaxed, suave, and remarkably safe from police raids and other anti-homosexual hazards. In 1957 she published her extraordinary memoir Gay Bar, the first book by a heterosexual to depict the lives of homosexuals with admiration, respect, and love.
In this new edition of Gay Bar, Will Fellows interweaves Branson s chapters with historical perspective provided through his own insightful commentary and excerpts gleaned from letters and essays appearing in gay publications of the period. Also included is the original introduction to the book by maverick 1950s psychiatrist Blanche Baker. The eclectic selection of voices gives the flavor of American life in that extraordinary age of anxiety, revealing how gay men saw themselves and their circumstances, and how others perceived them.
Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association
Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
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Synopsis
By examining names and naming patterns from
Stephen Hero through
Finnegans Wake, Culleton not only discusses what they reveal about Joyce’s thought and practice as a writer, but explores their historical, literary, and cultural implications, stressing that naming is not only a creative act but a political and patriarchal impulse as well. Following Joyce’s example of continually raising larger questions, Culleton considers the function names have in modern aesthetics and in life and what names reveal about the people that bear them.
Both serious and playful, Culleton’s study demonstrates how Joyce’s onomastic bravado is tied to his aesthetics and grounded in the Irish literary tradition of magic, creation, power, and rhetorical one-upmanship.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-141) and index.
About the Author
Claire Culleton is assistant professor of English at Kent State University.