Joyce's Benefictions: Perspectives in Criticism

· Univ of California Press
Ebook
160
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Helmut Bonheim's Joyce's Benefictions offers a lucid, tightly argued tour of Joyce's major works, reading rebellion and anti-authoritarian play as the motor of both style and theme. Moving from Dubliners and A Portrait to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Bonheim shows how Joyce's "outlaw" procedures—parody, portmanteau, montage—are inseparable from his persistent fascination with the very institutions he resists. Chapters on Leopold Bloom's humane but compromised paternity, the alphabetic and musical "os" motif in Ulysses, and the serial role-reversals that unsettle any fixed hierarchy frame Joyce's art as a long experiment in fusing technique with a heterodox ethics. Part of the influential Perspectives in Criticism series, the book situates Joyce's innovations within broader debates about authority, language, and the cyclical logics of history. Equally attentive to close reading and big claims, Bonheim reconceives Finnegans Wake as a theater of competing sovereignties—fathers, kings, priests—perpetually toppled and reinstalled, with Earwicker's fall and return emblematic of the work's comic-epic design. A culminating chapter casts Joyce's art as an "epic of anarchy," balancing formal audacity with a surprisingly stable prose lucidity that keeps even the Wake's densest passages tethered to intelligible rhythms and social comedy. For scholars and advanced students of modernism, Joyce's Benefictions remains a compelling synthesis: a study that models how to read across oeuvre, medium, and myth to disclose the ethical pressure under Joyce's verbal pyrotechnics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
Helmut Bonheim's Joyce's Benefictions offers a lucid, tightly argued tour of Joyce's major works, reading rebellion and anti-authoritarian play as the motor of both style and theme. Moving from Dubliners and A Portrait to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Bonheim shows how Joyce's "outlaw" procedures—p...

About the author

Contributor: Helmut Bonheim Enter the Author Bio(s) here.
Contributor: Helmut Bonheim Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.