Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History
Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism

Examines the relationship between Joyce, postmodernism, feminism and colonialism in Ireland.

Christine van Boheemen (Author)

9780521035316, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 December 2006

240 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.9 cm, 0.359 kg

Boheemen-Saff's claims are big, her language is dense, and the allusions to major 20th-century thinkers are many; those who like such language and insights will find this is a brilliant study aboust how literature wpeaks to the pshychological and linguistic consequences of colonialism. S. Browner, Choice

In Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf examines the relationship between Joyce's postmodern textuality and the traumatic history of colonialism in Ireland. Joyce's influence on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida's philosophy, Van Boheemen-Saaf suggests, ought to be viewed from a postcolonial perspective. She situates Joyce's writing as a practice of indirect 'witnessing' to a history that remains unspeakable. The loss of a natural relationship to language in Joyce calls for a new ethical dimension in the process of reading. The practice of reading becomes an act of empathy to what the text cannot express in words. In this way, she argues, Joyce's work functions as a material location for the inner voice of Irish cultural memory. This book engages with a wide range of contemporary critical theory and brings Joyce's work into dialogue with thinkers such as Zizek, Adorno, Lyotard, as well as feminism and postcolonial theory.

Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
1. The stolen birthright: the mimesis of original loss
2. Representation in a postcolonial symbolic
3. The language of the outlaw
4. The primitive scene of representation: writing gender
5. Materiality in Derrida, Lacan, and Joyce's embodied text
Conclusion: Joyce's anamorphic mirror
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]