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BOOK REVIEWS While criticism no longer aspires to see steadily and whole, this is neither a wide-eyed nor blinkered treatment of a particularly thorny topic. Firmer editorial hands would have guaranteed a more adventurous , less lop-sided selection of texts—The Rescue, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", and Victory surely ought to figure here given the volume's ambitions—and more careful editing might well have cut back on repetitions as well as weeding out some of the contributions. Cedric Watts's forceful but dignified rebuttal to Achebe's famous semi-hysterical polemic ought to be cited within these covers, since, along with Edward Said, he may be said to have generated some of the work on display here. At times a more explicit awareness of the historical contexts of Empire would give greater assurance that contentions are on firm ground. The index is especially welcome in so diverse a collection, but references in the essays themselves do double service for a missing bibliographical guide to the topic. The volume is, in short, a respectable if not essential contribution to an on-going debate in which there has at times, perhaps understandably, been a good deal more heat than light. J. H. Stape --------------------------- Kyoto University Cultured, Popular, and All About Joyce R. B. Kershner, ed. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996. 223 pp. $49.95 BRENDAN KERSHNER'S COLLECTION of fifteen essays on the links between Joyce's writing and popular culture is framed by his introduction, which provides a helpful survey of the critical movements we now call cultural studies. Kershner casts the field in terms of a double trajectory, clarifying the differences between the British tradition and America's redefinition of it since the 1960s. Early analysts tended to voice suspicion of popular culture, which can function, in Kershner's terms, as "an agent actively undermining the possibility of genuine selfhood and moral responsibility." By the 1950s, however, critics began resisting the condescension implied in the high/low distinction. In America, Leslie Fiedler launched a major defense of popular culture forms such as the comic book, and by the 1960s the study of rock and folk music, science fiction and fantasy, and multimedia events began to expand our sense of what "culture" is. As Kershner notes, the influx of theories about culture, from critics like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, helped many in the work of decoding cultural variants, and he also 353 ELT 40:3 1997 acknowledges the stronger impact in America of Continental thinkers like Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the Frankfurt school. More recently, feminist criticism and postmodern studies have taken up the question of how popular culture has been coded as feminine, how deprecated, and how to be interpreted in its relations to modernist art, so often perceived as intensely intellectual and elite. Kershner answers the general tendency to view modernist art as that which rejects popular culture and postmodern art as that which embraces it. Like many of the essayists in the collection, he counters the canonization of Joyce as a "high" artist who only invokes popular culture with thick irony, suggesting instead that "Joyce studies themselves from the 1940s to the present to some extent have fostered a nonevaluative approach to popular culture in Joyce." Indeed, popular culture studies has been an emergent interest among Joyce critics for well over a decade. Kershner's own Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature lent a theoretical frame, following by a few years the publication of Cheryl Herr's Joyce's Anatomy of Culture. A smattering of essays and portions of books, such as Jennifer Wicke's Advertising Fictions, have by now left a powerful mark on the scholarship. Kershner's collection here serves to demonstrate the broad range of popular culture projects on Joyce, separated into four different sections: "Theoretical Approaches," "Popular Sources and Paradigms," "The Context of Culture," and "Joyce in Popular Culture." Readers familiar with Joyce criticism will probably gravitate to their favorite critic's essay first, and Kershner makes it easy for many of us by starting off with Derek Attridge's incisive discussion of Joyce's appeal to popular audiences. Attridge sets aside the image of Joyce as...

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