Joyce's Messianism

Joyce's Messianism
Author :
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages : 200
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1570035520
ISBN-13 : 9781570035524
Rating : 4/5 (524 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Joyce's Messianism by : Gian Balsamo

Download or read book Joyce's Messianism written by Gian Balsamo and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his study of negative existence and how it affects James Joyce's principal characters, Gian Balsamo joins the ongoing debate about the Irish writer's relationship to Dante and considers the centrality of messianism to that relationship. Finding in Dante a negative poetics that becomes a model for Joyce, Balsamo suggests that the inception and cessation of life - two occurrences that conventionally are deemed impossible to experience personally and directly - typically frame the existential experiences of Joyce's main characters. Balsamo perceives Stephen, Leopold, and Shem as messianic figures because they rebel against this convention, clustering their lives around the very events of inception and burial. Balsamo traces the engagement of each of the three characters in a negative existence immune from the rules and limitations of ordinary experience. Each struggles to express rather than exorcise the fecundity of his own mortality; each reinvents his biography as involving the pivotal transaction of one death - be it a mother's, a son's, or even that of his own body - in return for catharsis. Durkheim, and Noam Chomsky, Balsamo challenges the current debate by identifying the messianic thread that ties together the biographies of Joyce's three characters. Faced with the fissure between history and poetic vocation, Stephen embraces the sacrificial poetry of silence. Faced with the domestic squalor provoked by the loss of his son, Leopold renews at every meal the cathartic exchange of food and semen. Faced with a destiny of death and decomposition, Shem reenacts the tradition of the medieval cycle drama, stretching his own body like a parchment on a cross and then rubricating it like a sacred manuscript.


Joyce's Messianism Related Books

Joyce's Messianism
Language: en
Pages: 200
Authors: Gian Balsamo
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

GET EBOOK

In his study of negative existence and how it affects James Joyce's principal characters, Gian Balsamo joins the ongoing debate about the Irish writer's relatio
Joyce's Dante
Language: en
Pages: 247
Authors: James Robinson
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-10-14 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

GET EBOOK

Joyce's engagement with Dante is a crucial component of all of his work. This title reconsiders the responses to Dante in Joyce's work from A Portrait of the Ar
James Joyce
Language: en
Pages: 271
Authors: Harold Bloom
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009 - Publisher: Infobase Publishing

GET EBOOK

Presents twelve critical essays on the Irish writer and his works.
Understanding James, Understanding Modernism
Language: en
Pages: 329
Authors: David H. Evans
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-04-20 - Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

GET EBOOK

Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces
Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, Second Edition
Language: en
Pages: 393
Authors: Gerald Gillespie
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-09 - Publisher: CUA Press

GET EBOOK

The original version of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context strove to show how a kindred encyclopedic drive and sacramental sense informed their respon