Margot Norris

This compact, inexpensive companion to Joyce's masterpiece gives students an avenue into the novel as it introduces them to five important contemporary critical approaches.

Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives

A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses

Because the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners seem to function as models of fiction, they are able to stand in for fiction in general in their ability to make the operation of texts explicit and visible. Joyce's stories do this by provoking skepticism in the face of their storytelling. Their narrative unreliabilities--produced by strange gaps, omitted scenes, and misleading narrative prompts--arouse suspicion and oblige the reader to distrust how and why the story is told. As a result, one is prompted to look into what is concealed, omitted, or left unspoken, a quest that often produces interpretations in conflict with what the narrative surface suggests about characters and events. Margot Norris's strategy in her analysis of the stories in Dubliners is to refuse to take the narrative voice for granted and to assume that every authorial decision to include or exclude, or to represent in a particular way, may be read as motivated. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners examines the text for counterindictions and draws on the social context of the writing in order to offer readings from diverse theoretical perspectives. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners devotes a chapter to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners and shows how each confronts the reader with an interpretive challenge and an intellectual adventure. Its readings of "An Encounter," "Two Gallants," "A Painful Case," "A Mother," "The Boarding House," and "Grace" reconceive the stories in wholly novel ways--ways that reveal Joyce's writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues than we had thought.

Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners

Margot Norris discusses the challenges that Ulysses, one of the greatest and most difficult novels of the twentieth century, posed to the filmmaker, along with the production and censorship problems that Strick encountered before the film was released to great contemporary critical acclaim. James Joyce, interested in drama from his youth, encountered early Italian cinema in Trieste and subsequently worked to establish the first movie-house in Dublin in 1909. He eventually discussed his cinematographic writing techniques with the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. But although Joyce considered the possibilities of filming his famous 1922 novel at various times in his life, Ulysses was not brought to the screen until independent filmmaker Joseph Strick released his adaptation in 1967. Margot Norris discusses the challenges that Ulysses, one of the greatest and most difficult novels of the twentieth century, posed to the filmmaker, along with the production and censorship problems that Strick encountered before the film was released to great contemporary critical acclaim. Though rigorously faithful to Joyce's language, Strick's decision to set the story in 1960s Dublin subtly shifted its political focus while producing an intensified humanistic interpretation of Joyce's novel.

Ulysses

Looking at the work without novelistic expectations of the illusion of some "keyto unlock the mystery, Norris explores Joyce's rationale for committing his last human panorama—a bit sadder than Ulysses in its concern with aging, killing, and dying—to a form and language belonging to the deconstructive forces of the twentieth century.

A Structuralist Analysis

The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake

Professor Margot Norris

The twentieth century will be remembered for great innovation in two particular areas: art and culture, and technological advancement. Much of its prodigious technical inventiveness, however, was pressed into service in the conduct of warfare. Why, asks Margot Norris, did violence and suffering on such an immense scale fail to arouse artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent the recurrence of these horrors? Why was art not more successful—through its use of dramatic, emotionally charged material, its ability to stir imagination and arouse empathy and outrage—in producing an alternative to the military logic that legitimates war? Military argument in the twentieth century has been fortified by the authority of the rationalism that we attribute to science, Norris argues. Warfare is therefore legitimized by powerful discourses that art's own arsenal of styles and genres has limited power to counter. Art's difficulty in representing the violent death of entire generations or populations has been particularly acute. Choosing works that have become representative of their historically violent moment, Norris explores not only their aesthetic strategies and perspectives but also the nature of the power they wield and the ethical engagements they enable or impede. She begins by mapping the altered ethical terrain of modern technological warfare, with its increasing targeting of civilian populations for destruction. She then proceeds historically with chapters on the trench poetry and modernist poetry of World War I, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the film of Schindler's List, the conflicting historical stories of the Manhattan Project, a comparison of American and Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, and the effects of press censorship in the Persian Gulf War. By looking at the whole span of the century's writing on war, Norris provides a fascinating critique of art's ethical power and limitations, along with its participation in—as well as protest against—the suffering that human beings have brought upon themselves.

Writing War in the Twentieth Century

In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence

Beasts of the Modern Imagination

Vincent John Cheng

Kimberly J. Devlin

This volume presents a cultural criticism that analyzes the politics, art, fashion, and constructions of the body inscribed and transcribed in the Joycean text. The essays illustrate the dynamic interaction of art, culture, and criticism. They simultaneously explore the impact that Joyce's own culture, both high and low, had on his art, while assessing Joyce's reciprocal influence on our own contemporary culture. Following the paths of a long and pluralistic tradition of Joyce criticism, the new methodologies in this volume create, or culture, a new Joyce for the nineties.

Joycean Cultures, Culturing Joyces

James Joyce has long been viewed as a literary modernist who helped define and uphold modernism's fundamental concepts of the artist as martyr to bourgeois sensibilities and of an idealistic faith in artistic freedom. In this revolutionary work, however, Margot Norris proposes that Joyce's art actually critiques these modernist tenets by revealing an awareness of the artist's connections to and constraints within bourgeois society. In sections organized around three mythologized and aestheticized figures in Joyce's works—artist, woman, and child—Norris' readings "unravel the web" of Joyce's early and late stories, novels, and experimental texts. She shows how Joyce's texts employ multiple mechanisms to expose their own distortions, silences, and lies and reveal connections between art and politics, and art and society. This ambitious new reading not only repositions Joyce within contemporary debates about the ideological assumptions behind modernism and postmodernism, but also urges reconsideration of the phenomenon of modernism itself. It will be of interest and importance to all literary scholars.

The Social Unraveling of Modernism

Joyce's Web

This book explores the writings of James Joyce from his early poetry and short stories to his final avant-garde work, Finnegans Wake. It examines not only the significance of the ordinary but the function of natural and urban spaces and the moods, voice, and language that give Joyce's works their widespread appeal.

The Value of James Joyce

Because the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners seem to function as models of fiction, they are able to stand in for fiction in general in their ability to make the operation of texts explicit and visible. Joyce's stories do this by provoking skepticism in the face of their storytelling. Their narrative unreliabilities—produced by strange gaps, omitted scenes, and misleading narrative prompts—arouse suspicion and oblige the reader to distrust how and why the story is told. As a result, one is prompted to look into what is concealed, omitted, or left unspoken, a quest that often produces interpretations in conflict with what the narrative surface suggests about characters and events. Margot Norris's strategy in her analysis of the stories in Dubliners is to refuse to take the narrative voice for granted and to assume that every authorial decision to include or exclude, or to represent in a particular way, may be read as motivated. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners examines the text for counterindictions and draws on the social context of the writing in order to offer readings from diverse theoretical perspectives. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners devotes a chapter to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners and shows how each confronts the reader with an interpretive challenge and an intellectual adventure. Its readings of "An Encounter," "Two Gallants," "A Painful Case," "A Mother," "The Boarding House," and "Grace" reconceive the stories in wholly novel ways—ways that reveal Joyce's writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues than we had thought.

Margot Norris

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