Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Justice unbound
- 2 Joyce's sexual differend: an example from Dubliners
- 3 Dread desire: imperialist abjection in Giacomo Joyce
- 4 Between/beyond men: male feminism and homosociality in Exiles
- 5 Joyce's siren song: “Becoming-woman” in Ulysses
- Epilogue: trial and mock trial in Joyce
- Notes
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Justice unbound
- 2 Joyce's sexual differend: an example from Dubliners
- 3 Dread desire: imperialist abjection in Giacomo Joyce
- 4 Between/beyond men: male feminism and homosociality in Exiles
- 5 Joyce's siren song: “Becoming-woman” in Ulysses
- Epilogue: trial and mock trial in Joyce
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the writing of James Joyce, we have an unusually complex and self-conscious articulation of the problem of justice and its representation as defined under modern or post-Enlightenment conditions of ethical and political practice. My work interprets his formal and stylistic evolution from Dubliners to Ulysses as a progressive attempt to negotiate among the most fiercely contested and structurally significant modes of social difference - racial, colonial, class, and, especially, sexual - without pretending to a false transcendence. The interconnectedness of my critical topoi - the problem of justice, the contextually determined operation of gender, and the historical position and textual production of Joyce-will be examined from several angles in order to illuminate three basic areas of theoretical and literary concern: (i) the nature and value of justice itself, particularly with respect to the politics of gender; (2) the fundamental mutation in the parameters of justice made possible by the bourgeois, democratic revolutions and visible by capitalist and colonialist expansion; (3) most intensively, the manifestation of these theoretical and material developments in a sexual/textual politics peculiarly situated to take account of them. I find that Joyce's struggle to transform the pathos of his own ambivalent subject position into an ethos of discursive justice reveals both the self-transformative potential and the profound limitations of that ideal.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- James Joyce and the Problem of JusticeNegotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference, pp. xiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995