Introduction: the matter of Paris; 1. Paris encountered: 1902–03 writings; 2. Paris recognized: Stephen Hero and Portrait; 3. Paris digested: 'Lestrygonians'; 4. Paris re-envisioned: 'Circe'; 5. Paris profanely illuminated: Joyce's Walter Benjamin; 6. Paris compounded: Finnegans Wake.
James Joyce must be understood as drawing on French nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary innovations to grapple with the challenges of Paris.
Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of a forthcoming volume titled The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge). She is co-editor with Richard Brown of the James Joyce Quarterly special issue, 'Joycean Avant-Gardes'. Before studying literature, she practiced as an architect in Vienna, Austria, and in Ireland.
'This strikingly original book advances several interrelated
arguments about the importance of Paris for understanding Joyce's
work. Flynn shows that for Joyce, Paris embodied the
spectacle, and the challenges, of the modern city and its
burgeoning consumer capitalism. She argues that Joyce
responded to Paris by imagining new ways of thinking through the
senses, the body, and materiality generally. This 'sentient
thinking', as Flynn articulates it, is both an innovative model of
subjectivity and the formulation of an embodied
aesthetic. James Joyce and the Matter of Paris departs from
the dominant scholarly trends of the last two decades and promises
to reshape scholarship on Joyce, modernism, and aesthetics
decisively.' Marjorie Howes, Boston College
'James Joyce and the Matter of Paris changes our sense of
Joyce's entire trajectory. Flynn's eloquent and original
book demonstrates that Paris was for Joyce more than a
place to publish and flourish, more than a theme in his texts, it
was a style, a way of writing, of thinking and of
feeling. Thanks to this compelling study of the impact of a
French poetic sensibility on Joyce, we discover a more capacious
and politicized author immersed in
a modernité conceptualized by Walter Benjamin.'
Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
'Catherine Flynn gives us the first comprehensive guide not to
Joyce's Paris, but rather to Paris's Joyce: how the city, and the
artistic, economic, and cultural landscape he encountered there
fundamentally shaped the writer's vision. This book, for the first
time, shows us how Paris is the second city of the Joycean
imagination.' Barry McCrea, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
'This book presents evidence of Joyce's development that has the
authority of a documentary chronicle. With intellectual and
critical intelligence of exceptional discernment, Catherine Flynn
has given us a field-altering account of Joyce's literary career
and its establishing circumstances. James Joyce and the
Matter of Paris will be indispensable for Joyce studies as well as
for scholars of modernism.' Vincent Sherry, Washington University,
St Louis
Ask a Question About this Product More... |