Editor's Introduction

This issue has a simple broad focus, modernism, and I find it emblematic of the current vitality of modernist studies. Canonical authors like Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Beckett are examined successively in three clusters, but great attention is also paid to the historiography of pre-modernist trends, as we see with Mark S. Morrisson's original examination of the popular culture of Occultism and Spiritualism at the turn of the century, an often neglected underside of mainstream modernism. The literature and the culture of modernism now have their own archives, and Janine Utell explores the changes that these institutions have brought to the act of reading itself. Using the theories developed by genetic criticism, she describes the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia as an archaeological site for Joyce studies. Utell notes that these new practices do not prevent us from positing limits to the authority wielded by archives.

Two authors probe the strategies of inclusion of a colonial or oriental Other in key modernist texts. In "Cleopatra and Her Problems," John McCombe starts from the dense network of allusions to Cleopatra in order to show that Shakespeare's Egyptian Queen embodies an orientalist fantasy that ultimately sends us back to Eliot's position as a "metic" in the British Empire. Karl Reisman uses his vast knowledge of African languages to prove that the later Joyce was aiming at the inclusion of ancient and lost cultures via idioms like Fulfulde and Hausa. This groundbreaking essay sends us back to the happy old days of The Wake Newslitter while suggesting that there is still a lot that we don't know about Finnegans Wake. Making use of less philological than formal linguistic considerations, Elizabeth Barry argues for the centrality of a "middle voice" in Beckett's texts; the "middle voice" is defined as that which falls between the active and passive, the subjective and the objective, which allows Beckett to move from earlier concerns for agency to an altered insistence on pure witnessing.

In a provocative reading of Ulysses, C. David Bertolini claims that Bloom dies in the "Ithaca" episode, which would explain why this chapter marks what Joyce called the "end" of the novel. Bloom's permanence in Molly's monologue would thus be an application of the principle of literary metempsychosis. Meanwhile, Roy Benjamin examines the pervasive theme of the "Stone of Stumbling" in Finnegans Wake, a rich motif traced through the Bible, church fathers such as Origen and literary figures like Swift and Beckett. Insisting likewise on the postcolonial context, Todd Comer reads At Swim-Two-Birds politically by observing a productive clash between subaltern identities and the deployment of imperial power. Verbal play has always been a weapon of choice for still vocal subalterns, and Beckett shows this with a vengeance. As Flore Chevaillier demonstrates, Beckett's use of bilingual or monolingual puns in How It Is and Comment C'est stages a systematic deferral of meaning that corresponds exactly with Derrida's view of language as activated difference.

Finally, two review-essays map out recent cutting edge scholarship on Joyce and Beckett. Robert M. Kirschen reviews critics who follow intertextual echoes via countless literal or literary ghosts haunting Beckett's books and plays. Ruben Borg surveys new approaches to the Joyce canon, which tend to take off from the discourses of sexuality, power and history. Since as Shelton states in a recent book, even baby talk can be shown to carry a scandalous, politically subversive charge in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, we can now learn to read modernism better and speak its polyphonic idioms from scratch again.