Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas - Hardcover

Mahon, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802092497 ISBN 13: 9780802092496

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2007

Synopsis

How is meaning in one text shaped by another? Does intertextuality consist of more than simple references by one text to another? In Imagining Joyce and Derrida, Peter Mahon explores these questions through a comparative study of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the deconstructive texts of Jacques Derrida, with a particular emphasis on Glas.

Mahon's reading of these works insists on thinking through Derrida's 'Hegelian' manner of understanding Joyce. Using key texts of Vico, Kant, and Heidegger, Mahon develops a theoretical framework that allows him to theorize and re-conceptualize the intertextuality between Joyce and Derrida in terms of the imagination. In order to test the flexibility of this imaginative framework, Mahon applies it to a sustained comparison of Finnegans Wake and Derrida's under-appreciated masterwork, Glas. In so doing, Mahon reconfigures and expands the intertextual terrain between Joyce and Derrida beyond a simple catalogue of those instances where Derrida cites Joyce. Engaging and innovative, this erudite study makes an important contribution to literary critical theory.

About this title

From the Back Cover

'"Imagining Joyce and Derrida" is a singularly impressive and faithfully attentive study in how to read Joyce through Derrida, Derrida through Joyce, and, generally, how to be a good reader of both. Peter Mahon offers a scintillating read that is fresh, full of verve and wit, and produces a significant intervention in the field of Joycean studies through a radical revision of the notion of mimesis as rethought in Finnegans Wake. This is a welcome study by an author who is both a scrupulous, rigorous scholar and a lucid and engaging writer.'-Julian Wolfreys, Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University

About the Author

PETER MAHON teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas (U of Toronto P, 2007), Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2009), Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2010) and Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published essays in journals such as ELH, James Joyce Quarterly, Irish University Review, Partial Answers, as well as in edited volumes. He is currently writing a book on Reason and Unreason, working on a project on posthumanism in James Joyce and Jacques Derrida, and researching digital reading as part of a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0802092497
• ISBN 13: 9780802092496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 415