Joycean Possibilities: A Margot Norris Legacy

Description

This volume proposes to honor the trenchant, influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in essays that amplify her illumination of Joyce's oeuvre. The common denominator running through her work is her openness to Joyce's various modes of innovation; she pioneered alternative ways of regarding his fiction, the readers it addresses, the narrative and generic forms it alters, the world to which it refers, and the nature of the socio-historical status quo it exposes. These categories anchor and organize the collection: Joyce's textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories (including those of women), and variegated readerships.

Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor, the University at Buffalo. He is currently Vice-President of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Vicki Mahaffey is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Kezia Whiting recently received her PhD from the University at Buffalo, for her dissertation "Modernist Intimacies." She has published several articles on Joyce, Coetzee and Modernism.

"If Joyce contains multitudes of readings shaped by decades of critical approaches, how to make sense of texts and interpretations that both contain and do not contain themselves? Margo Norris solves the paradox by opening Joyce to more and more potentialities; her progressive opening of the critical frame has inspired generations of readers, as this marvelous and exciting collection written by the best scholars in the field amply shows" -Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "Whenever devoted and brilliant Joyceans gather, the sparks fly. In this new volume, fourteen gather to honor one of their best. Margot Norris's ideas inspire the essays; her example invigorates them; her generosity radiates in fourteen different directions. Virgin and veteran readers alike will find what they need in this book - a compact compendium of what we know about Joyce in the wake of Norris, but also a prismatic catalog of the questions that remain." -Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania (author of The Future of Decline, Stanford UP, 2022). "Margot Norris has been an important, influential, and inspiring critic of modernist literature, especially of James Joyce's writings-and so it is fitting that a number of prominent Joyce scholars have contributed to this collection of essays honoring her achievements, essays that illuminate and extend her own ideas and contributions." -Vincent J. Cheng, University of Utah Distinguished Professor. "This volume brings together a lively and distinguished group of scholars to discuss Norris's groundbreaking scholarly oeuvre. In a series of suggestive and enlightening essays, these scholars build on her suspicious readings, her considerations of readers' responses, her ethico-political engagements, and her uses of possible worlds theory to read Joyce in new ways" - Catherine Flynn PhD, University of California, Berkeley.