James Joyce and the Jesuits

Fresh close readings and psychoanalytic theory demonstrate how Joyce turned practices he learned from the Jesuits into challenges for readers.

Michael Mayo (Author)

9781108495295, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 April 2020

234 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

'Michael Mayo's lucidly written, patiently reasoned James Joyce and the Jesuits argues that 'Joyce's work addresses itself to particular crises of belief and representation generated by Ignatius of Loyola' in his Spiritual Exercises (1522–1524)… Mayo leaves us with a highly compelling conceptual framework: one that others might well profit from and apply further in their own engagements with the frustrations and enigmas of Joyce's art, and also its playfulness.' James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 123

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.

1. Introduction
2. The disturbed mind
3. Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle
4. The labour of reading: Joyce with Klein
5. Kleinian Aesthetics
6. Discernment and indifference
7. It was pitch dark almost
8. Substantiation
9. Conclusion: The transference
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Educational: Religious studies: Christianity [YQRC], Psychoanalytical theory [Freudian psychology JMAF], Spirituality & religious experience [HRLK], Christian spirituality & religious experience [HRCS], Religious issues & debates [HRAM], Religion & beliefs [HR], Religious & spiritual fiction [FW], Fiction & related items [F], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]