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Article Excerpt
James Joyce's Painful Case by Coilin Owens. The Florida James Joyce Series. Gainesville: U. Press of Florida, 2008. Pp. xx + 248. $59.95.
As a group, Joyceans suffer from the reputation of being obsessed with their man, and of considering little beyond his works--a reputation matched by Joyce's own notorious self-regard. A 200-page monograph devoted to a ten-page Dubliners story may strike some as symptomatic of this overly narrow preoccupation. In the present instance, at least, such a conclusion could not be further from the truth. Coilin Owens's James Joyce's Painful Case is one of the more intellectually capacious, wide-ranging studies on Joyce and his work to emerge in some time. One feels, having read it straight through, that not only a particular Dubliners story but Joyce's oeuvre and the Irish literary-cultural milieu in which the author wrote have been illuminated. The paradox at the heart of Owens's scholarly enterprise is worth highlighting: by narrowing his focus to one story, he nevertheless tells us much about an entire intellectual zeitgeist.
Owens rightly charges much of the existing criticism on this story with insufficiently historicizing "Joyce's engagement with literary, philosophical, and religious cultures," and of being opportunistically "illustrative of sophisticated theoretical paradigms" rather than "illuminative of Joyce's polyvalent language, the complexity of his designs, the cultural moment, and the elusive larger implications of his texts" (4). Joyce, Owens reminds us, is "first and last a poet who read the masters and measured his work against theirs. Out of respect--and some measure of understanding--of what this means, I approach his work not in order to illustrate some political or social position or theory of language, but to explore the imaginative world of which his...
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