Hating Joyce Properly

Abstract

I n meditating on plight of young scholars who wish to devote some significant portion of their careers to a study of Joyce, Colleen Jaurretche has recently critiqued a job market in humanities that demands diverse, culturally sweeping projects while devaluing the authority, legitimacy, and integrity of sustained, in-depth work on one author.1 Resisting what she sees as a market-driven demand for scholarly diversification, she concludes that sustained attention is threatened when we shape and mold our younger members into various forms of professional prudence that delegitimize pursuit of single-author study.2 This assault on market-forces, while seductive (albeit now familiar) in its terms, runs risk of nostalgically looking backward to a purer moment in history of literary studies, when scholars could lovingly devote their time to Joyce, or Eliot, or Pound without having to trouble themselves about thick descriptions of historical and cultural contexts increasingly favored by new Modernist studies. Jaurretche, of course, overtly makes no such claim, and there is no reason to suspect that type of singleauthor work which she imagines would ignore rich insights of cultural studies. The danger in lamenting decline of single-author study, however, is that by focusing too intently on a par? ticular figure of literary genius, we will, as Ann Ardis suggests, reproduce Modernism's negative evaluations, silences, and outright erasures of other readings of modernity [and] simply reinscribe a Modernist mapping of turn-of-the-twentieth-century ... literary and cultural history.3 Our very wish to embrace Joyce and other major Modernists even more tightly in loving grasp of our

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.