Pruning the Genealogical Tree: Procreation and Lineage in Literature, Law, and Religion

This book examines the literary themes of procreation and genealogy from the perspective of religious history and legal culture. Based on the thesis that lineage and family succession are endemically exposed to spurious and collateral ramifications, it engages genealogy as a construct, whose architecture is best exemplified in the trope of the genealogical tree: a modular assemblage of filiations whose branches, apparently all-inclusive, hide the intricacy of exclusion, suppression, discrimination, abusive graftings.
This book espouses Derrida's thesis, developed especially in Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce, that genealogical legitimacy is often the outcome of an imposition, a deliberation, or a prescription, rather than the spontaneous outflow of the bloodline.
The central subject of inquiry is James Joyce. Balsamo shows that in Ulysses the opposition of paternity and maternity goes hand in hand with the reciprocal contamination of language and religion.
This book addresses a composite audience of Joyce readers and scholars of biblical, genetic, and women's studies, as well as scholars of the intersections of law and religion, law and literature, religion and society, theology and philosophy.

Gian Balsamo teaches Humanities at Stanford University.