Vike Martina Plock

Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity

James Joyces interest in medicine has been well established--he attempted to embark on medical studies no fewer than three times--but a comprehensive assessment of the influence his interest in medicine had on his work has been lacking until now. Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity fills that gap as the first sustained study of Joyces artistic uses of turn-of-the-century medical discourses. In this wide-ranging study, author Vike Plock balances close readings of Joyces major texts with thorough archival research that retrieves principal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical debates. The result is a fascinating book that details the ways in which Joyce reconciled, integrated, and blurred the paradigmatic boundaries between scientific and humanist learning.

Sartorial Connections: Fashion, Clothes, and Character in Elizabeth Bowen's To the North

Post print version deposited in accordance with SHERPA RoMEO guidelines. Copyright

Object Lessons: Bloom and His Things

This article on “Ithaca” focuses on James Joyce’s use of objects in detailing and managing the description of his characters’ emotional transactions—Leopold Bloom’s in particular. It argues that, for Bloom, intersubjective relationships always have to be mediated by objects of everyday use to avoid confronting potentially extreme (and often distressing) emotional experiences. “Ithaca,” the episode that is commonly seen as the most scientific, rational, and dispassionate section of Joyce’s Ulysses, thereby emerges as a text that carefully negotiates emotional investments with the concurrent need to protect the subject from painful emotional experiences.

Introduction to "Joyce and Physiology"

whom delivered prominent addresses on the contested topic of the relationship between literature and science in higher education in the 1870s and 1880s, Joyce sets out to vindicate the study of literature and languages. If, he argues, the image of the seven earthly sciences in the Florentine chapel suggests that Arithmetic or Mathematics represents the culmination of human knowledge, the artist also “assumes that Grammar, or Letters, is a Science” ( Writing 12). Literature is, Joyce deduces, no lofty, speculative, or imaginary exercise but a precise and coherent system based on a measured symmetry of ideas, facts, and emotions—an organized and methodical compositional technique that is “ruled and directed by clear regulations, sometimes of facts, sometimes of ideas” ( Writing 13). In this inclusive reading of literature and science, literature becomes, once more, an ennobled part of mankind’s worthiest intellectual pursuit. Joyce’s contribution to the late-nineteenth-century “two cultures debate” is, admittedly, as pompous and sophomoric as many of his other juvenile literary attempts, yet his interest in the topic nonetheless merits consideration. The young Joyce was extremely alert to the intellectual and cultural fads and fashions of his time—his passionate support for Henrik Ibsen’s drama is a case in point—and his decision to follow in Arnold’s footsteps and write an essay on the relation ship between literary and scientific learning shows that the question of how to reconcile these different forms of knowledge mesmerized many at the turn of the century. Whereas, as Gillian Beer argues, in “the mid-nineteenth century, scientists still shared a common lan guage with other educated readers and writers of their time,” 2 things

Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions (review)

Since the 1995 publication of Kathleen Ferris’ James Joyce and the Burden of Disease, the subject of Joyce’s unresolved conflict with Catholicism and its promotion of absolute confession has been put back on the agenda of Joyce criticism. In his Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions, Wolfgang Streit now offers a novel interpretation of Joyce’s conflicted obsession with the confessional. Given the Catholic upbringing of the Irish writer it is indeed surprising that no book-length study on the subject of sexual confession has been written before. Yet as its title suggests, and despite occasional references to the troubling impact of Catholic authority in Ireland, Streit’s study does not rely on biography but on a Foucauldian framework in the analysis of Joyce’s texts, listing among the conventional readings of Joyce’s four major prose books, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and also the less-studied texts Chamber Music and Exiles. The latter are particularly welcome, not only because their inclusion gives credit to Joyce’s “lesser texts,” but it also confirms Streit’s argument that Joyce’s struggle with sexual confessions was truly an ongoing one. Essentially, the argument of Joyce/Foucault is that throughout his oeuvre Joyce developed a sustained and complex resistance to both the confession as an institution and its obligatory production of sexual discourse. In consistently applying Foucault’s theoretical reference system as developed in The History of Sexuality, Streit successfully avoids both an author-based argument and a pathologization of Joycean characters. What follows instead is a scholarly and meticulous literary analysis of Joyce’s works that pays significant tribute to their critical reception. Streit’s book thus offers more than a Foucauldian reading of Joyce’s texts, for it presents a first-rate synopsis of Joyce criticism to date, situating its argument firmly in the ongoing discussions of critical topics such as theology, Catholicism, narrative theory, and connections between sexuality and medicine. A distinctive strength of Streit’s book is also the excellent close-reading of Joyce’s works, especially the reading of Exiles and the skillfully executed analysis of Stephen’s guilt-ridden response to the Church’s demands for sexual purity in A Portrait. The chapter on Exiles is probably the strongest one of the book. It analyzes not only the content of the play, but also the theater’s integral emphasis on speech and discourse and its relevance for the topic of sexual confession as replacement for unfulfilled sexual desire. Naturally, Streit not only understands confession in its religious context, instead persuasively widening the scope of the book’s argument to consider a number of “profane confessional scenes” appearing in Joyce’s texts (40). Consequently, Streit reads Bloom’s masochism in accordance with Foucault’s analysis of a developing late-nineteenthcentury scientia sexualis. Having thus far successfully charted Joyce’s conflicting response to compulsory confession, the book then concludes with a competent analysis of the Wake that reads its “deferral of signification” as the most prominent attempt to evade the confessional (151). Yet in spite of the undoubted relevance of Foucauldian theory to Joyce’s oeuvre, Streit’s argument often over-amplifies its significance. Joyce texts often appear only as the playground on which the intellectual designs of the French theorist are probed. It remains doubtful if the speaker of the poem “What Counsel Has the Hooded Moon” in Chamber Music seriously prefers confession and sex discourse to physical love, or if HCE’s stutter in the Wake can be read exclusively as a metaphorical “resistance to the power over life” (145). Foucauldian theory seems over-applied at this point and the reader of Streit’s book is consequentially faced with the suspicion that it is not always productive to abandon traditional or conventional readings of Joyce in the attempt to make the text fit a theoretical framework. Inevitably, Foucauldian catchphrases