Publisher's Synopsis
Joyce's letters and recorded conversations, like the lectures, essays and books on his work that he sponsored, show that he endorsed some traditional interests of criticism. His radically experimental attitudes to form, language and the presentation of consciousness have also generated, and become the subject of, experimental critiques with roots in anthropology, linguistics and psychoanalysis.;This study works with both the critical methods Joyce endorsed and those his work has produced. It stresses the political dimension of Joyce's fiction - his socialism, his attitude to Irish nationalism, his prescient treatment of racism, and the relation of these issues to the mode of "Ulysses": comedy as ethical and political, a force against fanaticism.;The study also discusses Joyce's radical experimentation with form and language, and his challenges to notions of the individual subject and to stereotypes of male sexual identitiy. Many of these issues are dealt with following the episodic structure within which the novel gives rise to them, mindful that synoptic criticism can lose touch with basic pleasures of reading Joyce - the radiant clarity of his precise observations of world and mind, and his immense inventiveness with words.
