Reading Joycean Temporalities examines Joyce’s experimental treatment of modalities of time, (in)finitude, narrative presentation of temporal simultaneity, and psychological, historical, and Homeric time.

"No one yet has made Joyce's sponging ways so very, very interesting, or so important. Tony Thwaites takes the notions of promise, debt, mortgage, and signature forward to where no critic has yet gone, and back into the Joyce works to their new illumination. [He] demonstrates in lucid and engaging prose how the promise--a deferral founded on a certain notion of both past and future--structures Joyce's works."--Eloise Knowlton, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan In arguing that James Joyce's writing is structured everywhere by the peculiar temporalities of the promise--the not yet of speculation--and the signature that carries it, Tony Thwaites casts new light on a number of debates in Joyce studies and narrative theory. He maintains that to read Joyce is to be caught up in the pleasures of the promise but also by the frustrations of knowing that a promise remains a promise only as long as it doesn't (yet) deliver. In both the personal experience of reading Joyce and in Joyce's life, with its perpetual cycles of debt and wasteful spending, the promise is where things remain open to the future. Not only in the convoluted history of its publication but also in the structures of the writing, Joyce's work involves intricate delays, overbiddings, speculations, and promises. Through readings ranging from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Thwaites expands his analysis of this temporality into a discussion of the temporalities of fiction and the effects of the subject in language. Through this approach, Thwaites reframes a number of familiar critical debates and issues--Joycean aesthetics and history, the "mythic" parallels of Ulysses, the relationship of the interior monologue to literary realism, the vexed figure of the narrator, and the endless effects of signature and countersignature throughout the works. Tony Thwaites writes on modernist literature, literary theory, and cultural studies, and teaches at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

A comparative study of two classic literary works, from a specialist in Joyce and Homer Time and Identity in “Ulysses” and the “Odyssey” offers a unique in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes such as change, the self, and humans’ dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time—that people are constantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson’s analysis, both Ulysses and the Odyssey explore dichotomies including the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence and connection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer’s contrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce’s contrast of “clocktime” to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trapped by the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving, storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce’s radically different narrative styles and Homer’s timeless world of the gods. Nelson’s thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, and translation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. This book makes the case that Ulysses and the Odyssey should be read together and that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce’s characters are portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer’s hero fight his way out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

This book examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century, arguing the temporal multiplicity of music as the most dynamic way to subvert mimetic bias. Temporally vexed sound spaces rupture the narrative, transgressing the hegemonic structures to which it is subject.

In this landmark book, leading international scholars from North America, Europe and the UK offer a sustained critical attention to the concept of silence in Joyce's writing. Examining Joyce's major works, including Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, the critics present intertextual and comparative interpretations of Joyce's deployment of silence as a complex overarching narratological strategy. Exploring the many dimensions of what is revealed in the absences that fill his writing, and the different roles – aesthetic, rhetorical, textual and linguistic – that silence plays in Joyce's texts, James Joyce's Silences opens up important new avenues of scholarship on the great modernist writer. This volume is of particular interests to all academics and students involved in Joyce and Irish studies, modernism, comparative literature, poetics, cultural studies and translation studies.

Why are people so interested in what they and others throw away? This book shows how this interest in what we discard is far from new - it is integral to how we make, build and describe our lived environment. As this wide-ranging new study reveals, waste has been a polarizing topic for millennia and has been treated as a rich resource by artists, writers, philosophers and architects. Drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Bruno Latour and many others, Waste: A Philosophy of Things investigates the complexities of waste in sculpture, literature and architecture. It traces a new philosophy of things from the ancient to the modern and will be of interest to those working in cultural and literary studies, archaeology, architecture and continental philosophy.

Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists. In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the Renaissance in such figures as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Bruno. Joyce's own writing can itself be viewed through the rubric of renascence with the tools of genetic criticism and the many insights afforded by the translation process. Several essays in this volume examine this broader idea, investigating the rebirth and reinterpretation of Joyce's texts. Topics include literary historiography, Joyce's early twentieth-century French cultural contexts, and the French translation of Ulysses. Attentive to the current state of Joyce studies, the writers of these extensively researched essays investigate the Renaissance spirit in Joyce to offer a volume at once historically informed and innovative.