The New Joyce Studies ed. by Catherine Flynn (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The New Joyce Studies ed. by Catherine Flynn
• Ellen Carol Jones (bio)

THE NEW JOYCE STUDIES, edited by Catherine Flynn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xiii + 298 pp. $99.99 cloth.

Conjoining historical and political concerns with issues such as queerness, race, and transnational literary relations, or exploring issues of composition and publication, copyright law, translation, and the history of modernist criticism, the essays of The New Joyce Studies edited by Catherine Flynn aim to "refract Joyce's texts through new critical lenses and in doing so produce new kinds of analytical apparatuses" (210).

As the "master of urban deterritorialization," Joyce can serve African writers and thinkers as a model for the "plot of inertia"—an alternative to the heroic plots that structure much of the African literary tradition—of (post)colonial urban modernity, Ato Quayson suggests in "The Transcripts of (Post)Colonial Modernity in Ulysses and Accra" (21). Plots of inertia, defined by the dissociative "slow time" of indefinite actions, allow for the linguistic deformations that Quayson explores in the fictional 1904 Dublin and the contemporary Accra, Ghana. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor writing—the linguistic deformation of a dominant language from within, a minority's revolutionary deterritorialization of hegemonic discourse—necessarily enjoins a process of becoming for all minorities or denigrated entities within a society.¹ Everything in minor writing is political, Deleuze and Guattari claim; within the individual story vibrates an entire political history, and everything takes on a collective value: in the revolutionary enunciation of minor writing, the artist can express "another possible community" and forge the means for "another consciousness and another sensibility" (17). The dialectical interplay between the oscillations of the mind and the conversion of external stimuli into labyrinths of signification shape the deterritorialization of both Joyce's novel and the multilingual city of Accra, where the written word is omnipresent in public places and especially in the inscriptions on vehicles, coalescing the repertoires of both orality and literacy.

In "Joyce and Race in the Twenty-First Century," Malcolm Sen explores Joyce's representation of bodies of color in the context of empire, questioning how the "reshaping of cultural and personal definitions of what it means to be Irish inform our reading of race in Joyce's texts," and asking how these texts also inform our understanding of "the present and its multiple sociopolitical and ecological [End Page 161] challenges within which race operates as a key determinant" (36-37). At what point "do Joycean ironies fail to humanize and modernize subjects of color within empire?" (42). Can the postcolonial technique of resistant mimicry and mockery "fall short of its critical trajectory so that the repetition of stereotypes only rehearses rather than effectively undermines epistemic violence?" (42). Joyce's emphasis on cultural hybridity; his portrayal of the plight of a citizen considered, as a Jew, to be an outsider; and his advocacy of intercultural contact and hospitality toward "others" all offer "the potential of welcoming the stranger" (44, 45). For Sen, "Joyce appears at his anti-colonial best when he enmeshes his landscapes of otherness within the networks of empire and its globalizing impetus" (46).

In "Dubliners and French Naturalism," Flynn traces the ways Joyce radicalizes French naturalism's conundrum of how to move from observation to insight, intensifying the moral ambiguities of his stories, luring his reader to interpret what resists interpretation. Dubliners, she points out, is grounded in "the deeper ontological principles of naturalism—the eschewal of spiritual truths, conventional ideals, and religious faith and the close examination of the deforming effects of heredity, environment, and institutions—while rendering explicit the interpretive problems raised by those principles" (58-59). By tempting readers "to engage in a simoniacal reaching for the spiritual," for higher meaning, Dubliners teaches readers instead "to make a dialectical move from a materialistic environment, and the irrational idealism that reacts to it, to a way of thinking that rationally addresses the conditions of the contemporary world" (59).

Latin Americans understood Joyce, in counter-distinction to the icon of apolitical modernist aestheticism promulgated by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as "a marginal writer reaching a periphery from another periphery," a writer...