Valerie Benejam - Böcker

James Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

Looking beyond the view of James Joyce as a failed playwright to uncover how Joyce’s modernist breakthroughs are grounded in theatrical techniquesIn this book, Valérie Bénéjam argues that the success of James Joyce’s fiction lies in its theatricality and examines the role of drama throughout the writer’s entire oeuvre. While Joyce’s only surviving play, Exiles, was widely considered a failure, Bénéjam demonstrates that Joyce inserted theater and theatricality into his short stories and novels instead, where they became the markers of his specific modernist aesthetics.Bénéjam identifies a theatrical bent in Joyce’s early writings, seen in the minimalist play scripts of the epiphanies. His powerful use of dialogism continues in his early fiction, with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Ulysses, Joyce includes theatrical techniques such as soliloquy, dialogue, script, and asides, most evident in chapters like “Circe” and “Penelope.” And in his final work, Finnegans Wake, the conflict and crisis that are the essence of drama come to disrupt language at its very core.Blending biographical elements, close readings of text, and references to the playwrights whose work inspired Joyce, including Ibsen, Shakespeare, Wilde, and Synge, Joyce’s Theatrical Poetics moves chronologically to explain how drama, conceived by Joyce as a demand for truth and movement in art, played a key role in his revolutionary disruption of the novel genre.

James Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies.