Margot Norris (Irvine University of California)

The Value of James Joyce

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"Richard Ellmann said it best: "Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary." How so? Is there anything extraordinary about depicting a man going to the outhouse in the morning and defecating, pleased to find "that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone" (4.508)? Surely the act is commonplace enough, but its depiction in a 1904 novel, complete with the quiet thoughts that accompany it, is not. It suggests that even the most insignificant moments of a day can have meaning to human beings, and their representation in literature sharpens its realism to an extraordinary degree. In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses "the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)." The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse"--

Produktdetails

• The Value of
• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 164
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Juni 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 222mm x 145mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 316g
• ISBN-13: 9781107131927
• ISBN-10: 1107131928
• Artikelnr.: 43489630

Autorenporträt

Margot Norris is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emerita, at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on the work of James Joyce, including The Decentered Universe of 'Finnegans Wake', Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism, and Suspicious Readings of Joyce's 'Dubliners'. From 2004 to 2008, she served as President of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Inhaltsangabe

1. Introduction
2. The significance of the ordinary
3. The complexities of place
4. Cultures, old and new
5. Moods, voices, and language.