James Joyce and the Jesuits

Description

James Joyce was educated almost exclusively by the Jesuits; this education and these priests make their appearance across Joyce's oeuvre. This dynamic has never been properly explicated or rigorously explored. Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, this book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce's fiction. It takes readers through some of the canon's most well-read texts and produces bold, fresh new readings. By placing these readings in light of Jesuit religious practice - in particular, the Spiritual Exercises all Jesuit priests and many students undergo - the book shows how Joyce's deepest concerns about truth, literature, and love were shaped by these religious practices and texts. Joyce worked out his answers to these questions in his own texts, largely by forcing his readers to encounter, and perhaps answer, those questions themselves. Reading Joyce is a challenge not only in terms of interpretation but of experience - the confusion, boredom, and even paranoia readers feel when making their way through these texts.

Michael Mayo is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His research focuses on the experience of modernity, using psychoanalytic theory to understand how writers used narrative to negotiate the social crises at the turn of the twentieth century. His publications include work on James Joyce, twentieth-century theology, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.