Joyce's Art of Interpolated Quotation

BOOK REVIEWS ments argue that there is no such transcendent thing as the category of the aesthetic in the first place. Back in the Hopkins department, we recall , the old historicism lingers, but "it is its demystifiying rather than its imaginatively sympathetic power that is applied—its power to see through rather than to understand." So it goes, we are led to believe, with all else. At the center of present-day value of any sort is its démystification —which goes a long way to explain the sober skepticism of The Condition of English as well as the rhapsodic affirmativeness of Who Killed Homer? One more thing. Hanson and Health have an amusing list of concluding italicized desiderata for professional (if not social) renewal. Among them are seven "prerequisites" for book reviews in—horrors!—"narrow academic journals." "Any good computer programmer," they assure us, "could write the software to turn the now discredited enterprise over to the machines." How could the present reviewer—already struggling to avoid confessing that he last read Homer over twenty years ago—not squirm? One of the prerequisites is the following one: "Hedge by summing up with a final sentence that contradicts your entire review." In this spirit, let me make a last suggestion. The "academic exposé" portions especially of Who Killed Homer? should be required reading to all assistant professors as well as incoming grad students in the Hopkins English Department, while The Condition of English should be immediately translated into Latin as well as Greek and reviewed in The New York Review of Books. Terry Caesar Mukogawa Women's University Joyce's Art of Interpolated Quotation Eloise Knowlton. Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. 137 pp. $49.95 MY MOST lasting and lucid impression of Joyce's Portrait is of the hellfire sermons recounted in chapter three. I've heard them all before I thought, when I first read the novel. They reminded me of my own adolescence, its sexual proclivities, like Stephen's, stifled yet also oddly titillated by the admonishments of retreat masters. Thus, in a way, I was seduced by Joyce's mastery of quotation, his facility with the words of his own erstwhile masters. Reading Joyce's writing (or rewriting) of these exhortations made me realize how unoriginal they were and thereby helped release me from their original hold. But it was also at this cross335 ELT 42 : 3 1999 road, or crossword, of masterful quotation and beguiling memory that my subjection to Joyce began. In Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation, Eloise Knowlton seems to have understood my experience with Portrait, the way it moved me—by its unacknowledged use of authoritative voices from my past— out of an unconscious sometimes painful subjectivity into a conscious often pleasurable one. Knowlton's purpose is to expose, through an examination of Joyce's handling of citation, the ideology which citation, or quotation, enforces. For Knowlton, Joyce's famous resistance not to quotation , but to quotation marks, indicates his rejection of "the orderly containment of language and of us." Just as Stephen Deadalus eventually triumphs over the "terror and submission" brought on by the retreat sermons (Knowlton dubs them "extensive interpolated quotations") by reiterating , analyzing and critiquing the religious tradition that has helped subject him, so Joyce prevails over the proprieties of quotation, "a weight bearing pillar of modernity's episteme," by deploying and parodying quotation for the purpose of undermining the very idea of a unified subject distinct from the object of its infection. Quotation, in Knowlton's view (and according to her in Joyce's view as well) has become involved in a masculinist will to power that facilitates sexism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Tracing the route of the term "quotation" from its appearance on the English linguistic map in 1532 Knowlton emphasizes its associations with counting and quotas, both of which inexorably lead to the quintessentially capitalist practice of pricing and quoting stock. The free enterprise touted by stock marketeers , however, depends on staking out individual differences, sharpening a competitive edge that will then cut other contestants out. To the victor—the best quoted—go the market spoils. Knowlton...