James Joyce and Classical Modernism

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James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce’s defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce’s modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce’s fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce’s sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce’s work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce’s classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Series Editor Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Joyce and Classical Modernisms Joyce’s Classical Readers Redefining the Classical Chapter Overviews 1 Joyce’s Classical Passwords Mimicry, Laughter, and Joyce’s Jesuits Father Conmee’s Stroll and the Ironies of Jesuit Latin Joyce’s Cloacal Classicism Joyce’s Readers and Classical Enigmas 2 “So Let the Ruins Rot”: Joyce and Historical Apathy “The Great Men of History Had Names Like That”: Inhabiting Ancient History Translating Textual Rome Lessons in Forgetting Siren Songs and Mistaken Histories 3 Joyce, Homer, and the Seductions of Reading Buck Mulligan Thinks of Homer Joyce’s Phaeacians and the seductions of aesthetic distance The Life of Homer’s Phaeacians “I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being”: Becoming Joyce’s fiction Gendering Reception in the Classical Tradition Scapegoating and Stasis in the Reception of Classical Women Transforming the Authority of Classical Women Epilogue The Pleasures of (Not) Reading Joyce and the Classics “For All Those Who Never Made it Th rough Ulysses”: Maya Lang’s The Sixteenth of June Going to the Mat for Joyce: Fun Home and the Future of Joyce’s Classical Modernism Notes Bibliography Index