James Joyce and the Problem of Justice

Abstract

This is the first full-length study of James Joyce to subject his work to ethical and political analysis. It addresses important issues in contemporary literary and cultural studies surrounding problems of justice, as well as discussions of gender, homosociality and the colonial condition. Valente uses an original theory and psychology of justice through which to explore both the well-known and the more obscure of Joyce's works. He traces the remarkable formal and stylistic evolution that defined Joyce's career, and his progressive attempt to negotiate the context of social difference in racial, colonial, class and sexual terms. By analysing Joyce's verbal strategies within both the psychobiographical and sociohistorical contexts, Valente unlocks the politics of Joyce's unconscious and reveals the legacy of Western political thought.

Besprechungen

“…On the other hand, the lack of lemmatization means that all word forms of one lexeme have to be collected by the reader, who is not even assisted by cross-references; take the relatively simple case of the seven entries for abien (1), abigge (1), abiggen (1), abye (1), abyen (1), abought (1) and aboughte (4) where the glosses provided do not agree with each other (Tatlock and Kennedy 1963 lemmatize grammatical forms regardless of spelling so that abegge, abye and abyen come to be included under abie). There are, of course, much more complex sets involving a great deal of philological expertise in the user who does not wish to miss a token of the lexeme in question.…”

“…4 Das letzte Kapitel seines dritten Teils zur jakobinischen Allegorie widmet Scrivener Thelwalls Autobiographien: "There is hardly a Thelwall text that is not in some way also autobiographical" (257). Das walisische Thema ist hier jedoch weniger wichtig und überzeugend als die Warnung Thelwalls vor "impious parle", propagandistischer Verführung durch die konservativen Kräfte der alten Ordnung, ein Thema, das Scrivener überhaupt nicht aufgreift, obwohl es zur These, dass Thelwall seine politische Arbeit in der Literatur fortsetzte, besser passt als seine walisisch-biographistische Argumentation.…”

“…4 Dystopian fiction represents an excess of the law's propriety: "to be just is the imperative whose perceived fulfillment translates tyrannical force into legitimate authority." It further pursues the impetus which each exerted on the other's thinking and writing, especially after their marriage in 1880.…”