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Reviewed by:
  • Renascent Joyce ed. by Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia
  • David Pierce (bio)
RENASCENT JOYCE, edited by Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. x + 160 pp. $74.95.

“No single perspective can do justice to such a multifaceted writer: next to the medieval Joyce, the modernist Joyce, the Irish Joyce, the European Joyce … we must learn to make room for a Renaissance Joyce” (2). In their attempt at a re-branding exercise, the editors of this elegant, slim volume in the Florida James Joyce Series are nothing if not ambitious. By deliberately switching between “Renascent” and “Renaissance,” they have fashioned a book that eschews comprehensive coverage in favor of “even further rebirths within the Joycean realm” (6). In turn, what emerges is a study full of suggestive insights into what a thesis on “Joyce and the Renaissance” might uncover rather than what it should include. Eyebrows will be raised, however, because there is no essay on “Chamber Music and Elizabethan English Verse,” but perhaps on reflection, when it comes to Joyce, difference or a degree of quirkiness can be allowed. This is not, then, the last word on Joyce and the Renaissance.

“Renaissance” is a nineteenth-century label that has attracted criticism in recent years, in part because of the implied condescension toward the Middle Ages. If Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt had coined the term “early modern” instead of “Renaissance” to describe the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the editors of this volume would have been forced to assemble a different kind of book.1 On the other hand, the traditional idea of rebirth informs these essays, an idea now conceived in terms other than historical parallels, origins, or simple chronology. Thus, to take the most obvious example, two essays on translating Joyce into French conclude this French-inspired volume and reveal a kind of rebirth in [End Page 848] another language. Related to the overarching theme is an attention to what Joyce made of his sources and influences, and this is supplemented by excursions into defining Joyce’s achievement whether set in the past, present, or, in the case of Paul Saint-Amour’s essay, the future. Just as there is something problematic about the prefix “re” before “naissance,” so, too, there is a resistance when the word “and” is inserted after Joyce. This book, which wisely shelters itself under the phrase “Renascent Joyce,” is an attempt to shine new light on the complex field of prefixes and suffixes, and, while the volume as a whole might lack a certain reassuring reservoir of interconnectedness, each of the eleven essays has something distinctive to say.

The essay that opens the volume focuses on the Greek spirit in modernism. With “Telemachus” and the Renaissance in mind, the big question Philippe Birgy asks is: “How can a contemporary society start anew or enjoy a second lease of life?” (12). Joyce, he concludes, rehearses a number of alternative answers, including Buck Mulligan’s conflation of Friedrich Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold and the tension between sensualism and materialism, aestheticism and vitalism, mysticism and heresy, and interruption and flow (as in the subheadings in “Aeolus”). Through it all, Birgy argues, is the dialectic, the pull, as well as the continuity between these various positions. Bloom is confident that “[o]nce you are dead you are dead” (U 6.677), but then in “Circe” figures from the past return to haunt him. If there is a criticism, it is not that Birgy makes no room for gender and Molly’s rejoinder to everything that went before but that his spirited survey stands in marked contrast to a somewhat lame “resolution.”

Jonathan Pollock’s essay is a more straightforward account of historical defiance, discussing how Epicurean atomistic philosophy provided Renaissance thinkers with a means of challenging the medieval world picture. Indeed, according to Pollock, Finnegans Wake is “an experiment in atomist aesthetics,” filtered through the work of Joyce’s beloved Giordano Bruno (17). Lucretius himself is referred to only once or twice in the Wake, but this does not deter the author from his thesis. If he had needed further support, Pollock might...

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