Margot Norris

The Animals of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Even when they appear to signify a symbolic function, animals in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake generally remain grounded in the ecology of the natural world. We see a hen scavenging a ravaged landscape after battle, two cavemen struggling to acquire the means to speak and communicate, and hear the conflicting insects in a version of Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper argue. Yet all of these Wake an creatures remind us that the cultural contexts of their narratives reflect the need for food, habitat, and other resources necessary for the survival of living beings.

Joycean cultures, culturing Joyces

The study of culture -- both Joyces and our own -- provides the impetus for this volume of essays. This volume presents a culture criticism that is both analysis and judgment of politics, art, fashion, and constructions of the body inscribed and transcribed in the Joycean text.

Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake

The acute experimentalism of Finnegans Wake has always created a great deal of uncertainty and even controversy about its fictional, generic, and semantic operation. Is it a representation of a dream, a night world, or some other plane of unreality, or does it offer a narrative, either a relatively realistic one or a version of biblical or mythic or other collective stories? How can one adjudicate questions like this—on the basis of what sort of evidence? This article tackles the problem of how one might sort out the nature of the fictional world or worlds conveyed by the text’s complicated language by turning to a development in the field of narratology called “Possible Worlds“ theory. The theories of Marie-Laure Ryan, among others, offer us tools and criteria for understanding how readers achieve access to fictional worlds like the ones found in Book I, Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake .

The Stakes of Stephen's Gambit in "Scylla and Charybdis"

In a sense, the beginning of Stephen’s day—as we track it through breakfast at the Tower, teaching a class at the Dalkey school, a walk on Sandymount Strand, delivery of Deasy’s letter to Myles Crawford followed by two pub sessions, both at establishments called ‘Mooney’s’—can be considered as “preparatory to anything else.” That “anything else” would be the events at the National Library of Ireland that unfold in the episode we call “Scylla and Charybdis” and which arguably constitutes one of the climaxes in the story of Stephen’s day in Ulysses. What, precisely, is a “climax” in narrato-logical terms? Marie-Laure Ryan offers one of the more intriguing discussions of this question in the provocative context of “story generation”—that is, the creation of models of storytelling that might effectively be deployed in Artificial Intelligence computer program design. Instead of a simple definition, Ryan offers a series of characteristics of the narrative climax whose most interesting one she calls “functional polyvalence.” “The events with the greatest number of functions are likely to form the highlights of the plot,” she writes (249). These include the solution of a problem, the source of a problem, an infraction worthy of punishment, as well as merit and reward, and the possibility of offense and revenge. There is no question that Stephen Dedalus has a problem on June 16, 1904—indeed, a number of problems worthy of a quick recapitulation.

“No There There”: Place, Absence, and Negativity in “A Painful Case”

In this chapter, Margot Norris re-examines the significance of location and urban geography, climate, and ambience in Joyce’s stories. Focusing on “A Painful Case,” which readers might assume early on will be an adultery story given the allusions to Chapelizod, she argues that it not only comes as a shock that the affair does not, in fact, occur, but reveals that “A Painful Case” is something quite different, “a story with a secret, a hidden life, a hole in its narrative that reflects a hole in the psyche and life of its protagonist.” Her chapter provides quite a poignant reading of the story, and its protagonist, James Duffy, and offers a new way to approach and interpret “A Painful Case.” Pushing our readerly expectations to their outer limits, we find, she suggests, a large political and social system that marionettes Duffy and Mrs. Sinico via powerful social conventions and controls.

Don't Call Him "Blazes": Hugh E. Boylan's Narrative Caricature

Is the figure of Hugh “Blazes” Boylan in Ulysses a simple caricature, or is there more to him than that? The question invites us to explore what precisely we know about Boylan and how we learn what we know about him. It also prods us to think theoretically about the issue of how character is constructed in a work of fiction, and specifically what features determine whether a character is flat or round—a question that draws our attention to interiority. Given how significantly Boylan’s actions affect the plot and the fate of the Blooms in the novel, it is surprising that Boylan is given less interiority than many other minor characters and emerges generally as a caricature constructed by a small set of repeated features noted chiefly in the thoughts of Bloom and through the descriptions and innuendoes of narrative voices. Does this construction challenge the reader to question the fairness of Boylan’s representation and to distrust the subjectivity that infects his representation? By the end of Molly Bloom’s monologue, we have both a more complicated sense of this figure and a more cautious response to the ways fictional writing may prompt and condition our judgments.

Roll away the reel world: James Joyce and cinema

influence on Croatian writers. Evgenii Bershtein argues that Wilde’s biographical legend shaped the formation of sexual identities and ideologies in fin de siècle Russia. In all, this is an excellent collection of reader response and reception studies contributed by eminent Wildean scholars, with helpful bibliographies. It deepens the comprehension of the European legacy of Wilde’s works in multinational perspectives. However, it is pity that the collection didn’t include the reception of Wilde in Greece. Wilde treasured the cultural artefacts of ancient Greece. In 1877, as an Oxford undergraduate, Wilde was invited to fill out an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions and fears. Wilde’s answers testify to his deep appreciation for all things Greek: his favourite authors include Plato, Sappho, and Theocritus. In the same year, Wilde travelled to Greece with J.P. Mahaffy for almost two months. It would be interesting to see how the Greek intellectuals saw Wilde, who admired their country so enthusiastically. Of course, this is to cavil. The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe enriches our knowledge of Wilde’s complexity and modernity. The collection will be of interest to postgraduate students and specialists of Victorian studies, translation studies, and comparative literature studies, among others.

The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (review)

At its broadest, James Dawes’s The Language of War is a fascinating study of the relationship between war and language—both in the sense of what war does to language and in the sense of what sort of power language has to intervene in war. The materials for this study are widely drawn from history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and legal studies; generally located in the United States; and addressed to the culture and language that emerged after the Civil War, after World War I, and after World War II. Its most provocative and illuminating discussions occur at the beginning and the end, where Dawes’s focus is at its broadest and the issues are posed in their most globally significant terms. His Introduction establishes two conflicting models of the relationship between language and violence. The first is an “emancipatory” model based on the premise that language and violence are mutually exclusive, and that as a result “social structures built around democratic language practices emancipate us from the reign of force” (1). The second is a “disciplinary” model premised on the notion that language and violence constitute each other. As a result language functions “as a disciplinary regime premised on the use of force and as a method of disciplining and controlling violence in order to concentrate its effects” (ibid.). His intervening chapters take up an array of related issues (“counting and discrimination, objects and objectivity, autonomy and the problem of consequences, the solidity of conceptual borders, the referentiality of language” [23]) before returning to these models at the end of the book. In the last chapter, “Total War, Anomie, and Human Rights Law,” he conducts a stunning theoretical analysis of the Geneva Conventions. He begins by tracking how the conceptual maneuvers of international law governing the conduct of war achieve their aim:

Narrative Politics@@@The Politics of Narration: James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf

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