Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural PoeticsLiterary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's relationship to six of his literary predecessors. In clear and readable prose, Booker explores Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work. These six writers provide the opportunity to examine Joyce's work with regard to several of Bakhtin's most important concepts. If Homer represents the authority of epic, Rabelais represents for Bakhtin the subversive multivocal energies of carnivalesque genres. As opposed to his description of Dante's attempts to escape from historicity, Bakhtin figures Goethe as the epitome of engagement with the temporality of everyday history. And Bakhtin's generic denial of polyphony in the works of Shakespeare contrasts with Bakhtin's identification of Dostoevsky as the most polyphonic writer in all the world of literature. Together, Booker's comparative readings suggest a Joyce whose works are politically committed, historically engaged, and socially relevant. In short, they suggest a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality. M. Keith Booker is Professor of English, University of Arkansas. |
Contents
Reminds One of Homer Joyce Homer and the Myth of the Mythic Method | 17 |
Rabelais and Joyces World The Poetics of Inverse Transgression | 45 |
The Historicity of Language and Literature Joyce Dante and the Poetics of Appropriation | 81 |
The Unfinalizability of Literature and History Joyce Goethe and the Poetics of the Prosaic | 105 |
Shakespeare Joyces Contemporary The Politics and Poetics of Literary Authority | 133 |
Dostoevskian Problems of Joyces Poetics Narrative History and Subjectivity | 165 |
Modernism Postmodernism Joyce | 195 |
Notes | 225 |
Works Cited | 243 |
Index | 261 |
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Common terms and phrases
allegorical allusions argues artist attempt attitude authority Bakhtin Bakunin bildungsroman Bloom bourgeois Brecht cannibalism carnival carnivalesque Catholic central chapter of Ulysses characters Church Circe clearly Commedia complex contemporary context critics cultural Dante's Dead depiction dialogue discourse Dostoevsky Dublin Eliot Elizabethan emphasis epic especially example fact father Fetyukovich fiction figure Finnegans Wake Gargantua and Pantagruel genre Goethe Goethe's Hamlet Homer human ideology important individual interpretation intertextual Ireland Irish James Joyce Joyce and Dante Joyce's texts Joyce's writing language Leopold Bloom literature Lukács madness meaning medieval modern modernist modernist literature motif narrative notes notion novel parallels parody particular past play poet Poetics political polyphony Portrait postmodernism postmodernist predecessors Rabelais Rabelais's radically reader reading Joyce rejection sense sexual Shakespeare social society specific Stephen Dedalus subjectivity subversive suggests technique theory tion Trans transgression Twelfth Night Ulysses University Press Wilhelm Meister's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Woolf York