Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder

by R. B. Kershner

Overview

The sheer mass of allusion to popular literature in the writings of James Joyce is daunting. Using theories developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, R. B. Kershner analyzes how Joyce made use of popular literature in such early works as Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. Kershner also examines Joyce's use of rhetoric, the relationship between narrator and protagonist, and the interplay of voices, whether personal, literary, or subliterary, in Joyce's writing.

In pointing out the prolific allusions in Joyce to newspapers, children's books, popular novels, and even pornography, Kershner shows how each of these contributes to the structures of consciousness of Joyce's various characters, all of whom write and rewrite themselves in terms of the texts they read in their youth. He also investigates the intertextual role of many popular books to which Joyce alludes in his writings and letters, or which he owned — some well known, others now obscure.

Kershner presents Joyce as a writer with a high degrees of social consciousness, whose writings highlight the conflicting ideologies of the Irish bourgeoisie. In exploring the social dimension of Joyce's writing, he calls upon such important contemporary thinkers as Jameston, Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan in addition to Bakhtin. Joyce's literary response to his historical situation was not polemical, Kershner argues, but, in Bakhtin's terms, dialogical: his writings represent an unremitting dialogue with the discordant but powerful voices of his day, many inaudible to us now.

Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature places Joyce within the social and intellectual context of his time. Through stylistic, social, and ideological analysis, Kersner gives us a fuller grasp of the the complexity of Joyce's earlier writings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807843871
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/14/1992
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.79(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

R. B. Kershner is author of Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Abbreviations in the Text	xi
1.	Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Canon	1
	Joyce and Popular Literature	1
	Adolescent Attitudes	2
	Joyce, the Press, and Popular Writing	4
	The Problematics of Popularity	8
	Bakhtin's Dialogism	15
2.	Young Dubliners: Popular Ideologies	22
	"The Sisters": Breaking the Silence	22
	"An Encounter": Boys' Magazines and the Pseudo-Literary	31
	"Araby": Varieties of Popular Romance	46
	"Eveline": Bourgeois Drama and Pornography	60
	"After the Race": Modern Musketeers	71
	"Two Gallants": The Ideology of Gallantry	79
	"The Boarding House": The Rhetoric of Oxymoron	89
3.	Older Dubliners: Repetition and Rhetoric	94
	Stories of Maturity	94
	"A Little Cloud": Exclusion and Assimilation	96
	"Counterparts": Obsessive Repetition	101
	"Clay": Repetition and Dialogism	104
	"A Painful Case": The Rhetoric of Disembodiment	110
	Stories of Public Life	117
	"Ivy Day in the Committee Room": Consensus and Group Fantasy	118
	"A Mother": Economic and Social Rhetoric	124
	"Grace": Periphrasis and the Unspeakable	130
	"The Dead": Women's Speech and Tableau	138
4.	A Dialogical Portrait	151
	Dialogical Variations	151
	Dialogism and Incremental Repetition	154
	Stephen's Schooldays	165
	Tom Brown's School-Days	168
	Eric, or Little by Little and The Harrovians	176
	Vice-Versa	180
	Romantic Image	185
	A Modern Daedalus	190
	The Count of Monte Cristo	195
	Romantic Precursors	209
5.	A Portrait of the Artist as Text	216
	Stephen's Reading: Allusive Dialogism	216
	Peter Parley's Tales	216
	Ingomar the Barbarian and The Lady of Lyons	221
	Joyce's Reading: Elusive Dialogism	227
	The Ideology of an Aesthete: Havelock Ellis and The New Spirit	227
	Portraits of Artists and Others	233
6.	Sex/Love/Marriage: Portrait, Stephen Hero, and Exiles	253
	The Discourse of Sexuality and Marriage	253
	Charles Albert: L'Amour libre	258
	The Example of Exiles	262
	Grant Allen: The Woman Who Did	267
	Filson Young: The Sands of Pleasure	272
	Karin Michaelis: The Dangerous Age	277
	Marcelle Tinayre: The House of Sin	281
	Sexuality and Ideology	286
7.	Conclusions	297
	Notes	305
	Bibliography	321
	Index	332

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The interpretations offered here are among the most sensitive and enlightening that I have seen. . . . Kershner has produced an analysis with profound and diverse implications for further studies of Joyce and his culture.—James Joyce Quarterly

Editorial Reviews

Kershner has produced an analysis with profound and diverse implications for further studies of Joyce and his culture.

"James Joyce Quarterly"

From the Publisher