Joyce & Modernity

ELT 46 : 4 2003 some seeing them as evidence that James approved the costs "civilization " exacted from these characters, Hadley sees them as nothing more than his acknowledgment of civilization's power to exact such costs. He understood, Hadley believes, that the exclusive world he portrays in the late works is only possible through the misery or sacrifice of others —many others—through systems of gender and class identification and stratification. For Hadley, James was finally too much the realist to imagine an alternative to the world he understood so well. That is left to writers like Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf, who make it their business to imagine alternatives in their frank and stylistically experimental treatments of the pleasures and pains of passionate men and women. But Hadley's portrait of a writer concerned with the problematic ideals that underwrite the novel and culture give us a James constantly approaching rather than retreating from the world to enrich his art, and in so doing, moving beyond that world's limitations. LISA HONAKER Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Joyce & Modernity David Spurr. Joyce and the Scene of Modernity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xiii + 154 pp. $55.00 THE IDEA that Joyce criticism has reached critical mass has surfaced in recent years, most likely due to post-millennial introversion, but the reason for the unending approaches and readings of Joyce has more to do with his work's purposeful ambiguities and his anti-structural philosophy rather than our own critical preening. Considering this, David Spurr's Joyce and the Scene of Modernity is a timely and fruitful book. Spurr, ultimately, has written a paean to the anti-structuralism that pervades so many elements of Joyce, from his politics to his stylistics. More effective if read as a collection of essays rather than a cohesive work, the book's chapters enter Joyce's writing through different "scenes" of modernism—Dublin's cityscape, national spectacle, anti-Semitism, nineteenth-century anthropology, Shakespearian performance , the modernist authors' construction of their audience—in order to examine how Joyce's dismantling of hierarchies resided at multiple levels in his work, how it influenced and historicized later poststructural critics such as Derrida, and how it was indicative of Joyce's view of the modern condition. 458 BOOK REVIEWS Three of the seven essays are comparative, contrasting Joyce's take on different historical aspects of modernism with that of other key figures as a means to show how instability and anti-structuralism is Joyce's differentiating characteristic as the arch-modernist. "The Comedy of Intolerance in Proust and Joyce" juxtaposes the use of comedy in the portrayal of turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism in the work of Proust and Joyce as a means to show how Joyce's parody undermines the language of intolerance and identity; "Anthropologies of Modernism " contrasts the use of French Anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl's work by Eliot and Joyce in order to show how the Wake becomes a fragmentation of identity and time, as well asa parody of scientific discourse, which ultimately "collapses both myth and history into a radical materiality of language; their modes of representation become elements in a textual field of infinite combinations that annihilates the distinction between representation and its object"; "Joyce, Hamlet, Mallarmé" compares Joyce's use oÃ- Hamlet, with Mallarmé's reception of Mounet-Sully's performance to show how, for Joyce, Shakespeare became a symbol of dual and disrupted identity. The latter chapters which concern the Wake, "Fatal Signatures: Forgery and Colonization in Finnegans Wake," and "Writing in the Wake of Empire," both deal with the ways in which the language of the Wake dismantles ideology. The former through its comedie element melds Derridian theory with Joyce's colonial critique through the Wake's reoccurring fascination with Pigott's forgery of Parnell's letters, and the latter through the Wake's parody of the colonial classifying mindset. It should be apparent from this all-too-reductive summary that, since many of the essays highlight Joyce's writing against ideology, many of Spurr's targets and topics resurface with regularity: Joyce's use of irony and parody to disrupt diametric oppositions; Joyce disrupts the linguistic...