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BOOK REVIEWS revealing a questioning of cultural politics of science in Ireland, and turns a keen eye on the strategic role of Gibraltar as a Protestant, militarized stronghold and Joyce's aesthetic inversion of both—paradoxically again—British imperialism and resistant Irish nationalism in "Penelope." It would be unfair to Gibson to give away the key points of paradox for every chapter; suffice it to say that the book signifies an important contribution to Joyce scholarship, to post-colonial (or semi-colonial) studies, and to cultural-historical assessments of English literature. In reading Joyce's Revenge, one embarks on a rich journey into cultural history, previous scholarship, and the delightful density of the text itself. Gibson presents contextual material in an engaging manner, transforming sometimes familiar ground into provocative new readings of Joyce's aesthetic, Irish politics, and the force of English cultural nationalism. ALYSSA J. O'BRIEN __________________ Stanford University Modernism & Ireland Nicholas Andrew Miller. Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 DURING THE PAST DECADE, questions of historical representation , national authenticity and cultural identity have generally dominated Irish studies. In seeking to define Irishness in its modern context, many narratives speak to the rapid transformation of 1990s Ireland and the economic prowess of the Celtic Tiger in a newly unified Europe. Such accounts frequently depict the country as breaking at long last with an oppressive colonial past and rising to a rightful and prosperous place among developed sovereign nations. By such accounts, Ireland has in a sense reached the end of its history, insofar as that history depends on a position of colonial subjugation. In the introduction to his book Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory, Nicholas Miller challenges one such narrative history—Fintan O'Toole's thesis of an "ex-isle" modern Ireland no longer perceived or perceiving itself as a satellite island of Britain. Miller warns against the implosive potential inherent in such an assessment of Irish history when he writes, "When in the name of historical progress and development Ireland is reconfigured as an 'ex-isle' belatedly cut off from its own past, history is promptly reconfirmed as the perpetual nightmare from which Ireland is trying to awake." In such a way, this clever and fascinat235 ELT 47 : 2 2004 ing study commences with a Joycean nod before circling back, Finneganlike , to a final-chapter analysis of the Wake. In the intervening pages, Miller explores the function of memory in modern Irish historical imagination through a well-integrated and strategically calculated variety of critical perspectives and textual analyses. Before turning directly to Ireland, however, Miller's first interest lies in identifying a number of modernist discourses external to Irish culture and memory. Such discourses—including public monuments and cinema—he identifies as sites of ongoing cultural memory-work. Part One establishes these sites within the theoretical parameters of Marxist and psychoanalytic historicism. Focusing on a wide array of texts, including Holocaust memorials, Dante's Divine Comedy, and a Roberto Rossellini film, the three opening chapters introduce the vocabulary for an "erotics of memory" in visual and narrative representation of history. Through 2,146 Stones, contemporary artist Jochen Gerz's invisible and illegible Holocaust "counter-memorial," Miller examines some of the fundamental paradoxes of monuments to the past. These stones are in every sense the figurai and literal groundwork for Miller's study. Turning in chapter two to the modernist literary "touchstones" of Dante and Exodus, Miller reads the allegorical significance of two originary "lethal histories." The gazes of Dante's pilgrim across the River Lethe , of Moses across the River Jordan, express the link of desire forged between memory-work and narrative. The chapter next mines critical strata leading from Arnold and Benjamin, to Jameson, Freud and Althusser . The result is a functional alloy of historical and psychoanalytical approaches positing "that history is a discourse of desire" and from which emerges, in a revision of the famous Jamesonian slogan, Miller's own mantra: "always eroticize!" This sets up, in the subsequent chapter, the first extended textual analysis, a Lacanian reading of Roberto Rossellini 's Viaggio in Italia. Contrasting the direct cinematic adaptation of...

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