Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

James Joyce’s preoccupation with space―be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical―is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts―or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

Valérie Bénéjam is Maître de Conférences in English literature at the Université de Nantes. She wrote her PhD under the supervision of Jean-Michel Rabaté at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, and has written numerous articles on Joyce. She is currently completing a book-length study of Ulysses entitled All About Molly, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.

John Bishop is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in 20^th-century British and American literature. In addition to having written numerous articles on Joyce, he is the author of a study of Finnegans Wake that has become a classic of Joyce criticism, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986). He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.