James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism

In this 2001 book Jean-Michel Rabaté approaches the Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'.

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Author)

9780521009584, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 August 2001

260 pages
22.8 x 16.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.36 kg

'James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, a work of extra ordinary breadth and perceptiveness, makes for fascinating reading. Rabaté's sophistication, his intellectual range, and his generous tolerance for different critical and theoretical approaches combine to produce a major contribution to the study of Joyce (and of modernism). Modernism/Modernity

In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, 'hospitality', a term Rabaté understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to 'the other'. For Rabaté both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabaté examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabaté explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.

Foreword
1. Aprés le mot, le déluge: the ego as symptom
2. The ego, the nation and degeneration
3. Joyce the egoist
4. The aesthetic paradoxes of egoism: from egoism to the theoretic
5. Theory's slice of life
6. The egoist and the king
7. The conquest of Paris
8. Joyce's transitional revolution
9. Hospitality and sodomy
10. Textual hospitality in the 'capital city'
11. Joyce's late modernism and the birth of the genetic reader
12. Stewardism, Parnellism and egotism.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]