Joyce in Context (review)
Joyce in Context is the latest of a long and fairly distinguished line of James Joyce conference volumes; it is based on presentations given at the 1989 James Joyce Conference In Philadelphia. Since this was not one of the International Joyce Symposia, the volume Is dominated by contributors from the United StatesÂ—although the contributions from international scholars (those by Fritz Senn, Denis Donoghue, and the Chinese translator of Joyce, Professor Di Jin) are particularly good. Perhaps the most striking feature of the volume is the number of contributions from younger scholars. The editors, both well-established Joyceans in mid-career, deserve credit for attempting something other and better than rounding up the usual suspects. Cheng and Martin give as rationale for their title that "much critical interest now centers on the way in which the 'literary' text is derived from, reflects, responds to, is illuminated or even exposed by, or interacts 'with' other texts," or "con-texts." The essays themselves have been grouped into four divisions: the Modernist Context, the Context of the Other (which includes mostly feminist essays), Contexts for Joyce (Joyce and the Irish Revival, Lacan, Homer, and cartoons), and a grab-bag category entitled "Re-reading Joyce: Joyce in His Own Context." In what is potentially the most substantial of the essays, Denis Donoghue examines one variant of a leftist case against Ulysses, put most forcefully by Fredric Jameson. This argument Is that Ulysses is politically regressive because it invests the modern world of alienating culture with a deceptive halo of meaningfulness. In a related move, Leo Bersani attacks Joyce's use of interior monologue as a way of conservatively reinscribing the bourgeois subject, a charge often made by Marxists as well. "Marxists have never been able to avoid the snobbery of thinking that their soliloquies are fine," Donoghue comments acerbically, "but that mine are sordid functions of late capitalism." Marshaling Levinas as well as Deleuze and Guattari, Donoghue sketches an elaborate counterargument with implications for our understanding of representation. Unfortunately, along the way he seriously misreads a recent Jameson essay, throwing his entire argument into question.