James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism by Rabate

توضیحات

James Joyce and the politics of egoism is a book without an introduction or a Conclusion. James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism as a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of “egoism.” This concept, Jean-Michel Rabate argues, runs throughout Joyce’s work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, “hospitality,” a term Rabate understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to “the other.” For Rabate, both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London-based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde.

Rabate examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce’s engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabate explores Joyce’s complex negoti-ation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.

JEAN-MICHEL RABATE is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997), The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), and Joyce Upon the Void: the Genesis of Doubt (199 1). He has also written and edited many books and articles on modernism and literary theory.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer‘s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.