In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ELT 42 : 3 1999 (and I quote, though I shouldn't) "continuous with Joyce's language, deriving not authority but lexicon from it, generating not more modern meta narrative, but a careless kind of continuity. (At least one that does not care about quotation.)" Ironically such disrespect for authority, Knowlton admits, could only get a hearing or viewing if it were institutionalized . The Joyce industry would have to agree that critics can Dedalate , Mollify, Bloomerize, and Wake up their texts without acknowl-edging debts or identifying sources. Subject/object might then be unified. Not likely, given the current need to defend professors of the Humanities as serious and scholarly citers of the "master" texts. Knowlton concludes by suggesting that the power of citation will erode not by the action of courageous academics but rather under the influence of the electronic media where texts circulate unimpeded by quotational rules. Maybe. But it seems to me that the medium of electronic circulation with its rituals for getting on and offline, its dependency on power in all of its manifestations and its availability to only a rather privileged moneyed group of communicators may represent a greater danger to psychic, intra-cultural, and transnational unity than the MLA style sheet ever has. Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation is a provocative study of a convention that has both trapped and released us. After all, to quote others in your study of Joyce not only sets you off from them but also assigns them some of the blame or responsibility for your conclusions. Not to quote can be viewed as a most egotistical behavior, while quoting might be considered a form of intellectual bonding. Quoting both extends and demands credit, charges and bestows interest simultaneously on quoter and quoted. It is as reciprocal as it is divisive. Knowlton has started me thinking about these issues in ways I had not considered before . And she has done so in a style of writing that I admire so much that I cannot resist quoting it. Read her short book (113 pages of text); you will very likely want more on the subject. Mary Lowe-Evans __________________The University of West Florida Joyce's Good Night Lessons Colleen Jaurretche. The Sensual Philosophy: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. xi + 156 pp. $27.95 ONE OF THE GREAT difficulties of James Joyce's writing is its energetic pursuit of obscurity. Where other modernists sought to render "the 338 BOOK REVIEWS new" in contradictory and often discordant terms, Joyce seemed to delight in darkness in and of itself, making the night into the central preoccupation of his maturity. Finnegans Wake, to which he dedicated the last seventeen years of his writing life, tropes upon the mind in darkness, the body in sleep, the imagination waking into a new sense of itself, the dream as a metaphor for a remote, dimly glimpsed and unprovable sense of the connectedness of all human experience. Colleen Jaurretche's new book, The Sensual Philosophy, lucidly examines Joyce's penchant for obscurity, finding its roots in medieval mysticism , and in the nineteenth century's appropriation of mystic traditions to provide alternatives to the rationalism and materialism that more usually characterized late Victorian and early modern culture . If Joyce is often cryptic, ambiguous, insistent on the ineffable, concerned with a shadowy confluence of body and mind, Jaurretche suggests that there is good reason for it: her book serves as a guide to one writer's magical mystery tour. The Joyce who emerges from these pages is adept at sleights of hand, taking forms and procedures from their original, theistic purposes in order to reinvest them with private, aesthetic meanings. Jaurretche first shows us a young artist whose interest in medieval mysticism is aligned, paradoxically, with Irish identity, as if, in founding nationality upon ancient forms of transcendence ("a local deity" [Critical Writings 166]), the Irish could evade lineage, language, and the more usual determinates of a burdensome, colonial heritage. The artists who interested him early in life—Blake, Wilde and James Clarence Mangan—were all writers who resisted memory and history, constructing rebellion from the ineffable life of the mind. Mangan...

pdf

Share