Joyce against theory

Abstract

This work sets out to map the genealogy of a possible location of "Joyce" and "theory" in the present-day Joyce studies, and, equally important, to think of the meanings of the copulative conjunction and which separates/unites the two. The phenomenon of the contagious "Joyce and…" to be found in a plethora of book-, and even more so, paper-titles is significant in its own right, bespeaking as it does not so much a lack of imagination on the part of the scholarly community, as a central tendency of Joyce's writing, variously described as (all-) inclusiveness. Joyce's writing process, itself based on addition and expansion, produced texts whose semantic reference, more than in the case of any other writer, is extra-textual as much as intertextual, deferring its meaning to the lived experience of a specific historical reality no more than to other texts. This tendency, in turn, solicits a repetition in the response of Joyce's readership (from the project of textual annotation of the earliest to the complex genetic examinations of avant-textes of the contemporary Joycean scholarship), whether of the individual exegete, or- again, to a degree paralleled by no other writer-of a reading group. Joyce's texts, from the floating signifiers of "paralysis," "gnomon," and "simony" in the first paragraph of 'The Sisters'...