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BOOK REVIEWS writing in Ulysses, that conjured visions of eros—Bloom and Molly's sexual fantasies—cannot substitute for eros used as a metaphor for divine union, that the creative imagination conjuring visions cannot be mistaken for the ineffability of the soul in its contemplation of God, but it would be more difficult to challenge Jaurretche's insight when it is applied to Finnegans Wake. To me, her most illuminating work comes at the end of the book when she turns her attention to the great work of Joyce's maturity, for, in this case, darkness unquestionably provided Joyce with a structural metaphor that spanned the final decades of his life. Indeed, Jaurretche's greatest gift to Joyce scholarship and to literary study in general is the elucidation of obscurity when obscurity is so markedly there. Like John Bishop's ground-breaking study of the Wake, Joyce's Book of the Dark, this slender volume makes its claim to excellence by confronting and moving through darkness and unknowing without trying to explain them away. If, as Bishop argues, the sleep of the body creates a mind befuddled with distortion and a heart subject to unlicensed desire, so Jaurretche insists that the sleep of the mind, the nada at the center of John of the Cross's mount, can help us to experience Joyce's resonant conflation of sense and nonsense in his life's final project. The literal sleep of the Wake, she.explains, "begets the darkness that, in the paradox of mystical discourse, permits spiritual wakefulness . The alert slumber of the dreamer mimics the language and logic of contemplation." In a manner that is both learned and droll, Jaurretche even manages to show a relationship between Jacob's Old Testament ladder, John of the Cross's ladder of spiritual ascent, and the ladder from which Joyce's pub keeper, Tim Finnegan, falls, killing himself, until it is time to wake, rouse and dance at his own funeral. Have a beer, Joyce seems to say, at the foot of the Cross. Don't forget the needs of the body in the revelations of the dawn. Joyce's vision, Jaurretche implies, casts mysticism as comedy , and the inarticulate body as the site of redemption. Her book, a wry, contemporary version of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, invites us, by no means obscurely, to join her in a pint of sensual philosophy. Carol Loeb Shloss ____________________ West Chester University Joyce & Female Costumes Elisabeth Sheffield. Joyce's Abandoned Female Costumes, Gratefully Received . Madison: Farleigh Dickingson University Press, 1998. 147 pp. $31.50 341 ELT 42 : 3 1999 IN A WORK that will surely provoke heated debate among critics —Joyce's Abandoned Female Costumes, Gratefully Received—Elisabeth Sheffield challenges assumptions supporting the received feminist readings both of the works of James Joyce and of literature in general that have been current since the early 1970s. In a study that seeks to rebut the concept of Joyce as protofeminist, Sheffield re-examines the foundational work of Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, and Cixous, and uses her findings to mount an argument that feminist literary critics over the past two decades have misapplied post-structural hermeneutics to interpretations of Joyce's writing. Sheffield acknowledges the ambivalence and ambiguities characterizing Joyce's prose, but she sees them not as representative of the gendered other of écriture féminine but rather as a stylistic figure, "a dangerously other" form of writing. Sheffield's opening chapter reviews key issues in post-structuralist thinking, and then goes on to contest conventional feminist applications of these ideas: In an interview with Ann Liddle and Susan Sellars, Cixous asserts that the way men and women experience their bodies and pleasure are not the same and these differences "are transmitted through the text." It may be true that men and women experience their bodies and pleasure differently, differently enough that such a generalization could overrule the differences from individual to individual. Who really knows—with the possible exception of hermaphrodites ? But it seems particularly risky, at least from an intellectual standpoint, to state that these differences manifest themselves via cultural stereotypes of what is "masculine" or "feminine." "Fluidity" or "generosity" in a text are...

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