Joyce and the ideology of character

Abstract

There are in a way no characters. Joyce to Ole Vinding, on the subject of Work in Progress , in 1936. What are the functions of the term character as it operates in our literary criticism and conversations today? What does it enable us to think and to say, what does it prevent us from thinking or saying? What are the terms in our discursive system that it overlaps with and reinforces, what are the terms it comes into collision with? These are questions which I believe the writing of Joyce poses with particular force, perhaps with more force than any other set of texts assembled under a single authorial name. They are large questions, which, to be treated with the fullness they deserve, would require extensive answers. Let me simply assert that the term character crystallizes and enforces a number of assumptions about the human subject, whether one is discussing the characters in Dubliners , or writing a character reference for an employer, or exclaiming ‘He's quite a character!’, or admiring a politician as a ‘person of character’, or responding to Pope's notorious lines: Nothing so true as what you once let fall, ‘Most women have no characters at all’.

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 — 14 citations exist upstream.