Vincent J. Cheng

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.

Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Joyce Studies

In the canon of modern English literature, there is perhaps no more ‘canonical’ a figure than James Joyce. Such literary and academic canonization has produced a massive Joyce scholarly industry, with a significant and voluminous display of published scholarship, textbooks, college courses, doctoral dissertations, faculty appointments, and scholarly symposia. Joyce’s canonical status has been to large degree achieved over the past six decades through the academy’s estimation of Joyce as a revolutionary prose innovator within a High Modernist context. But in recent years critical studies of Joyce have begun a radical re-evaluation, compellingly re-presenting Joyce instead as an anti-canonical, anti-imperialist, and even nationalist writer — via the lenses of contemporary postcolonial theory and cultural criticism. To the ‘canonical Joyce’ we have responded with the ‘postcolonial Joyce’.

Serum transthyretin is a predictor of clinical outcomes in critically ill trauma patients

BACKGROUND In surgery patients, low preoperative serum transthyretin (TTR) level is associated with greater rates of infection and mortality. However, the predictive value of TTR on surgical outcomes after major trauma has not yet been studied. METHODS Critically ill trauma patients who underwent surgery for trauma and had TTR preoperatively measured after admission to the surgical intensive care unit (ICU) at the LAC+USC Medical Center (01/2008-05/2014) were identified retrospectively. Univariable and multivariable regression analyses determined the significance of TTR on outcomes. RESULTS We identified 348 patients. Univariable analysis indicated that patients with lower TTR had more infections (P < .001), higher mortality (P = .007), longer hospital stay (P < .001), longer ICU stay (P < .001), and increased ventilator days (P < .001). Even after adjusting for differences in patient characteristics, lower TTR level was associated with greater infectious complication rates (P = .001), greater mortality (P = .005), longer hospital stay (P = .013), longer ICU stay (P = .030), and increased ventilator days (P = .044). CONCLUSION In critically ill trauma patients, low serum TTR level is associated with poorer clinical outcomes, and its prognostic utility warrants further study.

The Nightmare of History and the Burden of the Past

William Faulkner wrote famously that in the American South, “[t]he past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Indeed, for the modern world, the past seems a burden that one—whether an individual or a community—has to carry around in the present. Many modern thinkers have been thus engaged in a memory crisis arising out of this obsession with the power and the burden—of the past, what Milan Kundera calls “the burden of memory.” This chapter explores the issues involved in trying to extinguish the past (and the memory of the past), focusing particularly on Joyce’s and Kundera’s novels, but also on novels by Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy—within Nietzsche’s and Renan’s arguments about the desirability of forgetting.

The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration

This chapter takes up two case studies involving Irish national memory and commemoration. The first explores the ways that Joyce’s works—from “The Dead” to Finnegans Wake—treat the historical memory of William III, Prince of Orange (and his horse), at the Battles of Aughrim and the Boyne, the events that sealed the future of Ireland as a British colony and as an island of divided allegiances (orange vs. green), with Unionists revering the memory of King Billy and Republicans despising it. The second case study takes up a more recent battle, the 1916 Easter Rising, and explores the varying and conflicting ways that it has been remembered for the past 100 years, including during the recent 2016 centenary commemorations.

Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing

This chapter probes the ethics of historical memory by considering two contemporary developments having to do with Southern race hatred, slavery, and the complex dynamics of remembering/commemorating problematic histories: the killings by Dylann Roof at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the recent revelations about Georgetown University’s slaveholding past (having to do with Irish Jesuit priests) and the University’s current attempts to come to terms with that past.

Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes

This chapter explores the historical connections between Ireland and the American South—particularly the shared dedication to lost causes, the role of Irish nationalism and Irish immigration in the formation of Irish American identity, and the divisiveness of racial issues involving the Civil War and slavery. The Irish—considered racially other at the time, not white—nevertheless managed to become accepted by Southern natives as white Southerners, so much so that Gone with the Wind, the most influential cultural representation of Southern culture of the Civil War era, could have its heroine (Scarlett O’Hara) be the daughter of an Irish immigrant whose Southern white status is not even questioned. The chapter discusses how this union between Irishness and Southernness came about—and explores Joyce’s depictions of the South in several of his works, concluding with a discussion of the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, which have much to say about the Irish presence in the South, the Ku Klux Klan, and racial strife.

The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses

This chapter begins with a discussion of Ernest Renan’s influential 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its argument for the importance of national forgetting to the peace and unity of a nation-state, and then focuses on one particular literary case study, Joyce’s treatments of these issues in Ulysses. The second half of this chapter continues pursuing the complex realities of national “memory” and the nation-state—by considering the role of “place” and “space” in Irish memory and the Irish national imaginary through a series of controversies about the nature of “Irishness” and the Irish nation, from the eighteenth century to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination

Amnesia—as a neurological condition—is always represented as a bad thing, a loss of a personal identity that one desperately needs to recover. Much scholarly and scientific work has been done, in recent decades, on issues having to do with memory, Alzheimer’s, trauma, remembrance, memorials and monuments, truth and reconciliation. But hardly anyone ever talks about the desirability or usefulness of forgetting—which is a central concern of this study. Drawing on Nietzsche, Marx, Renan, Freud, Luria, Anderson, Yerushalmi, and others, this introductory chapter considers the importance of forgetting—and then goes on to consider the complex relationships between remembering, forgetting, imagination, desire, and narrative.

The impact of pre-injury controlled substance use on clinical outcomes after trauma

BACKGROUND A disproportionately high percentage of trauma patients use controlled substances, and they often co-ingest multiple drugs. Previous studies have evaluated the effect of individual drugs on clinical outcomes after trauma. However, the impact of all drugs included in a comprehensive screening panel has not yet been compared in a single cohort of patients. METHODS All trauma patients who underwent urine drug screens after admission to the LAC + USC Medical Center (January 2008–June 2015) were identified retrospectively. Univariable and multivariable regression analyses determined the significance of all drugs tested in the hospital’s standard toxicology screen (amphetamine, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, cocaine, opiate, phencyclidine) on clinical outcomes. RESULTS A total of 10,166 patients who underwent admission toxicology screening were identified. Although 5,621 patients had completely negative screens, 3,292 patients tested positive for only one drug and 1,253 patients tested for multiple drugs. Univariable analysis indicated that patients who tested positive for multiple drugs had higher rates of operative intervention (p < 0.001), longer hospital stay (p < 0.001), and longer ICU stays (p < 0.001). Multivariable analysis indicated that phencyclidine was associated with higher rates of mortality (p = 0.025) whereas amphetamine was associated with lower rates of mortality (p = 0.012). Higher rates of operative intervention were observed in patients testing positive for amphetamine (p < 0.001), benzodiazepine (p < 0.001), or opiate (p < 0.001). Benzodiazepine use was associated with higher rates of mechanical ventilation (p < 0.001), but use of amphetamines (p = 0.021) or opiates (p < 0.001) was associated with lower rates. CONCLUSIONS Pre-injury use of amphetamine, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, cocaine, opiate, and PCP has a significant and variable impact on clinical outcomes after trauma. Comparing the relative effect of each drug class can help clinicians risk-stratify all trauma patients, including those who test positive for multiple substances. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Epidemiologic study, level III.