Joyce in Trieste

BOOK REVIEWS him to reconstitute his understanding in light of a reinterpretation of past experiences." A brief but suggestive conclusion extends the book's argument to James's autobiography, which reveals in a different genre the recreative power of perception. Jamesian autobiography is a recursive and retrospective "creation, not a mere 'accounting'" of self. With its recurrent theme of the imperfectly perceiving and discriminating protagonist, a study of this kind runs the risk of reducing texts as different as The American and The Ambassadors to a single pattern of bewilderment and illumination—perhaps especially because Meissner 's readings revisit territory that is familiar from the work of Paul Armstrong, Ross Posnock, Carolyn Porter, and others. Henry James and the Language of Experience reflects some of this flattening effect, but Meissner is a talented reader, and the occasional predictability of the larger thesis is compensated by the local richness of his insights into the texts in question. For instance, Meissner's nuanced analysis of point of view in The American demonstrates that James's deliberate "bifurcation " of consciousness subtly registers the tension between Claire's perspective and Newman's idealized and ahistorical reading of her. The book does not wholly live up to the ambitious aspiration announced in the introduction to "get past the opposition between formalism and historicism which has placed contemporary criticism in a state of semiparalysis "; despite Meissner's attention to themes of capital and relocation , the dramas of consciousness traced here are more phenomenological than ideological per se. But Meissner's demonstration that phenomenological criticism still speaks to us is itself an important critical testament. A welcome and worthy successor to Armstrong's Phenomenology of Henry James, Henry James and the Language of Experience testifies to James's continuing and productive appeal to critics of consciousness. One factual correction: Daisy Miller's Mrs. Costello is misidentified as a character in The Turn of the Screw. Sheila Teahan Michigan State University Joyce in Trieste John McCourt. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. xi + 306 pp. $29.95 JOHN MCCOURT'S STUDY of James Joyce's Trieste years breaks considerable new ground. A nice complement to Richard EUmann's still-towering Joyce biography, and a useful amplification of Peter Hart523 ELT 44 : 4 2001 shorn's recent James Joyce and Trieste (1997), McCourt's felicitously written if at points burdensomely detailed study fills in gaps in our knowledge of Joyce's early artistic career and offers largely convincing interpretations of the ways in which events in Joyce's quotidian and intellectual life inform his fictions. McCourt is perhaps uniquely situated to take on this task: a Dubliner by birth and education, fluent in Italian, and a Joycean by training, he has lived for the past decade in Trieste, where he teaches English at the University of Trieste and directs the annual Trieste Joyce School. The Years of Bloom proceeds chronologically from Joyce's initial departure from Dublin, bound for points East with Nora Barnacle in tow, in October of 1904, to his final departure from Triste, in July of 1920, in the shadow of the Great War. In between, McCourt vividly chronicles and, in the process, reassesses the formative years of Joyce's artistic vision, which took place during the author's years as a teacher of English in the Adriatic port city's Berlitz School. McCourt reminds us of the importance of Joyce's Trieste years to his overall career: It was in Trieste that Joyce wrote most of the stories ofDubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Exiles, and significant sections of Ulysses . While locating all of these works in Dublin, Joyce was also absorbing the social, political, literary, linguistic, and religious atmospheres of [Trieste]. This influence is overtly reflected in the only prose work he set outside his native city, his short, intense Triestine prose poem Giacomo Joyce; [it] is more surreptitiously present as a continental perspective in the Irish world and worldview of Ulysses; and is heard as a distinct voice in the linguistic meanderings οι Finnegans Wake. McCourt observes that Trieste influenced Joyce most as a "crossroads of competing...