Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism

Description

Christine van Boheemen examines the relationship between Joyce's postmodern textuality and the traumatic history of colonialism in Ireland. Joyce's influence on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida's philosophy, Van Boheemen suggests, ought to be viewed from a postcolonial perspective. Joyce's writing bears witness to a history that remains unspeakable, functioning as a material location for the inner voice of Irish cultural memory. This book engages with a wide range of contemporary critical theory and brings Joyce's work into dialogue with thinkers such as Zizek, Adorno, Lyotard, as well as feminism and postcolonial theory.

Boheemen-Saff's claims are big, her language is dense, and the allusions to major 20th-century thinkers are many; those who like such language and insights will find this is a brilliant study aboust how literature wpeaks to the pshychological and linguistic consequences of colonialism. S. Browner, Choice