Description
James Joyce was educated almost exclusively by the Jesuits; this education and these priests make their appearance across Joyce's oeuvre. This dynamic has never been properly explicated or rigorously explored. Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, this book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce's fiction. It takes readers through some of the canon's most well-read texts and produces bold, fresh new readings. By placing these readings in light of Jesuit religious practice - in particular, the Spiritual Exercises all Jesuit priests and many students undergo - the book shows how Joyce's deepest concerns about truth, literature, and love were shaped by these religious practices and texts. Joyce worked out his answers to these questions in his own texts, largely by forcing his readers to encounter, and perhaps answer, those questions themselves. Reading Joyce is a challenge not only in terms of interpretation but of experience - the confusion, boredom, and even paranoia readers feel when making their way through these texts.
Fresh close readings and psychoanalytic theory demonstrate how Joyce turned practices he learned from the Jesuits into challenges for readers.
About the Author
Michael Mayo is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His research focuses on the experience of modernity, using psychoanalytic theory to understand how writers used narrative to negotiate the social crises at the turn of the twentieth century. His publications include work on James Joyce, twentieth-century theology, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Reviews
'Michael Mayo's lucidly written, patiently reasoned James Joyce and the Jesuits argues that 'Joyce's work addresses itself to particular crises of belief and representation generated by Ignatius of Loyola' in his Spiritual Exercises (1522-1524)... Mayo leaves us with a highly compelling conceptual framework: one that others might well profit from and apply further in their own engagements with the frustrations and enigmas of Joyce's art, and also its playfulness.' James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 123
Book Information
ISBN 9781108495295
Author Michael Mayo
Format Hardback
Page Count 234
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 460g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 18mm
Fresh close readings and psychoanalytic theory demonstrate how Joyce turned practices he learned from the Jesuits into challenges for readers.
About the Author
Michael Mayo is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His research focuses on the experience of modernity, using psychoanalytic theory to understand how writers used narrative to negotiate the social crises at the turn of the twentieth century. His publications include work on James Joyce, twentieth-century theology, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Reviews
'Michael Mayo's lucidly written, patiently reasoned James Joyce and the Jesuits argues that 'Joyce's work addresses itself to particular crises of belief and representation generated by Ignatius of Loyola' in his Spiritual Exercises (1522-1524)... Mayo leaves us with a highly compelling conceptual framework: one that others might well profit from and apply further in their own engagements with the frustrations and enigmas of Joyce's art, and also its playfulness.' James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 123
Book Information
ISBN 9781108495295
Author Michael Mayo
Format Hardback
Page Count 234
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 460g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 18mm
