Joyce's Disciples Disciplined: A Re-exagmination of the "Exagmination of Work in Progress"
Edited by Tim Conley
Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010
50 Euros |
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In 1929, ten years before James Joyce completed "Finnegans Wake", Sylvia Beach published a strange book with a stranger title: "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress". Worried by the confusion and attacks that constituted the general reception of his "Work in Progress" (the working title for "Finnegans Wake"), Joyce orchestrated this collection of twelve essays and two 'letters of protest' from such writers as Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams. "Our Exagmination" represents an altogether unusual hybrid of criticism and advertisement, and since its first appearance has remained a touchstone as well as a point of contention for Joyce scholars. Eighty years later, Joyce's "Disciples Disciplined" reads the "Exagmination" as an integral part of the larger composition history and interpretive context of "Finnegans Wake" itself. This new collection of essays by fourteen outstanding Joycean scholars offers one essay in response to each of the original "Exagmination" contributions. From philosophically informed exegeses and new conceptions of international modernism to considerations of dance, film, and the flourishing field of genetic studies, these essays together exemplify an interdisciplinary criticism that is also a lively and ongoing conversation with that criticism's history.
Contents
Introduction (Tim Conley)
Dangerous Identifications, or Beckett's Italian Hoagie (Jean-Michel Rabate)
The Life of Brion's 'Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce' (Sam Slote)
Joyce, the Master Craftsman- Frank Budgen and the Making of the Wake (Dirk Van Hulle)
Postlegomena to Stuart Gilbert's Prolegomena (Patrick McCarthy)
Eugene Jolas and the Joycean Word in Transition (Andrew J. Mitchell)
The Prosaic 'Rhythm of the Successive Pictures', or Going to the Movies with James Joyce and Victor Llona (Moshe Gold)
Joyce En Pointe - Robert McAlmon Reviews an Irish Word Ballet (Carol Loeb Shloss)
Thomas McGreevy and 'The Catholic Element' in Joyce (John Nash)
Disappointment and Transcendence - Reading for the Plot and Not in Finnegans Wake (Pamela Brown)
The Secret, the Baffled, the True - John Rodker and Late Avant-Garde Reading (Laura Heffernan)
Shocking Language - Robert Sage and the Circuitry of Meaning (Vicki Mahaffey)
A Point for Intercultural Criticism (Stephen John Dilks)
Finnegans Wake in a Dentist's Waiting Room (Finn Fordham)
The Pleasure of Meeting Mr. Dixon (Fritz Senn)
Index.
See the publisher's website for more information. |
Eye of the Hawk
by Tim Conley
Toronto: BookThug, 2009
$10.00 |
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Ever since it was first played, the game sometimes known as Eye of the Hawk has exerted a powerful grip on the imagination. While this brief history and guide can make no claims to be comprehensive, it offers a cogent outline for the student and beginner and some perhaps unfamiliar details for the scholar and seasoned player. The importance of the game becomes self-evident in the course of its contemplation: it has become a metaphor for our lives.
See the publisher's website for more information. |
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Encyclopedia of Fictional and
Fantastic Languages
by Tim Conley and Stephen Cain
Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin
Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2006
$75.00 (US) |
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"The Encyclopedia of Fictional and
Fantastic Languages (like Borges's fantastic, category-eviscerating encyclopedia) is
good to think with, and sf scholars will no doubt find it richly suggestive."
-- Samuel Gerald Collins, Science Fiction StudiesSome of the most popular creative works are appealing because of the artificial
worlds their authors create. In many of these works, fictional languages are essential to
the setting and plot, and often help the author comment on social issues. This
encyclopedia examines fictional and fantastic languages in a broad range of literature,
films, and television shows.
"A unique addition to the literary reference shelf... an essential resource tool for
the teacher, researcher, librarian, linguist, and reader."
-- Booklist
"Conley and Cain provide over 200 entries on
fictional languages in prose literature, film, and television. Most of the entries
cover languages in science fiction and fantasy genre texts, whereas others present
linguistic exploration in diverse works, e.g., Casanova's 1788 novel Icosameron....[t]he
encyclopedia includes many excellent figures, diagrams, and illustrations of fictional
scripts, alphabets, and grammatical constructions. Entries are usefully cross-indexed,
and the book includes a handy list of topical groupings like 'dinosaur languages' and
'gender-based languages.' The authors write with enthusiasm and authority, as does
Ursula LeGuin in the foreword."
-- Choice
See the publisher's website for more information. |
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Whatever
Happens
by Tim
Conley
Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2006
$21.95 (CDN) |
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"Conley veers from neighbors
politely fencing verbally over the rope they each intend to hang themselves with, to four
guys going to a bar in the company of a talking dog, and over to the dream of an unhappily
married painter. Through all of the shenanigans, Conley stays focused on the emotional
truths that run through even the shaggiest of his shaggy (or talking) dog stories.... The
easy intimacy Conley wrests from bewildering situations is marvelous."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Light-hearted, unpredictable, and infused with Puckish
wit."
-- Alex Good, The Kitchener Record
"A clever, inventive, immensely appealing
collection."
-- Barbara Gowdy, author of The Romantic and We So Seldom Look on Love
"Tim Conley's characters question the boundaries of what
can be known -- and challenge the reader with the implications of living in an unknowable
world. His stories tell us again that the silences are often the loudest notes in
the aria. A welcome new voice with a unique vision."
-- Michael Bryson, The Danforth Review
From the back cover:
Whatever Happens is a collection of stories for
people who feel that reality is not the best deal going. Sometimes spare, these nineteen
stories move between the obsessive and the disinterested, the extraordinary and the
humdrum.
See the publisher's website for more information. |
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Joyces Mistakes: Problems of
Intention, Irony, and Interpretation
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003
$50 (CDN)
Visit The
Modern Word if you would like to order a copy. |
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"Conley offers a substantive look at
theories of error, both in transmission and in cognition.... Very well written. From
felicitous phrases to cleverly arranged rhetorical strategies, Conley imbues his text with
clear, forceful, invigorating prose."
-- Garry Leonard (University of Toronto at Scarborough)
"A major addition to Joyce criticism."
-- Zack Bowen (University of Miami)
“Tim Conley’s book is a must; I have never laughed so often while reading a
critical work on Joyce. This is a book from which you will want to read passages to
friends on the phone, not just because it contains many hilarious one-liners and facetious
remarks, but because it forces you to look at classical questions of literary hermeneutics
in a new key, thus rethinking basic issues like sense, authority, and intention that are
not entirely circumscribed by Joyce. One might say that this is the book
about Joyce that Ludwig Wittgenstein would have written if he had read Finnegans Wake
and concluded that Joyce was dyslexic.”
-- Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce Quarterly
"Conley brings out all the air of adventure and eventful errantry inherent in textual
transmission, shattering the unjust image of dry colorlessness traditionally associated
with textual criticism.”
-- Dirk Van Hulle, James Joyce Literary Supplement
"Imagine the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, in collusion with the stage Irishman Buck
Mulligan, collaborating on a critical text spoofing academic interpretations of Joyce's Ulysses.
Both Buck and Stephen would have to have made a brief detour from Oxford to Paris,
respectively, via Canada and the University of Toronto.... Such a Mulligan stew cooked up
for scholars might well resemble Joyces Mistakes."
-- Suzette A. Henke, English Studies in Canada
See the publisher's website for more information.
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The Mirror
Toronto: BookThug, 2001
Illustrated by Jennifer Koopman
$8 (CDN) |
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A handsome chapbook
published in a limited run of 52 copies, brimming with typographical errors. E-mail the publisher if you'd like to order a copy
(while, as they say, supplies last). |
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