Modernism's body

Christine Froula

In this provocative study, distinguished scholar Christine Froula argues that James Joyce used his artist-figures' suffering, transgressions, resistance, masquerade, parody, creativity, and play to turn the perversity often laid at his door into a daring critique of his culture. A departure from earlier feminist views of Joyce as misogynist, patriarchal, masochistic, or an inventor of ecriture feminine, Modernism's Body allies Joyce's arduous effort to translate his culture's unconscious knowledge into consciousness and conscience with the revolutionary energies of feminism and psychoanalysis. Froula contends that Joyce retrieves from repression certain psychodynamics of masculinity that Freud and Lacan leave buried - particularly the profound and far-reaching effects of the son's early identification with the mother. Rethinking Lacan's view of Joyce as a cultural "symptom," she shows how Joyce fashions deliberately symptomatic performances of himself as Daedalus, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, Shakespeare, Penelope, and other Western icons and parlays them into a powerful diagnosis of social and cultural institutions.