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Chapter 5 - Theoretical modelling: Joyce's women on display
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- By Diane Elam, Professor of English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory Cardiff University
- Edited by Laurent Milesi, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- James Joyce and the Difference of Language
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 24 July 2003, pp 79-96
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Summary
It could be said that Joyce set himself the project of bringing about the death of the novel by writing a series of novels so exemplary that there would be nothing more left to do. Joyce's linguistic experiments seem to push the very limits of literary language as far as they can go. In Joyce's hands, literature appears to be exhausting itself through its own example, insofar as his exemplary oeuvre reads like a mini-history of the novel: from realist birth (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), through modernist middle age (Ulysses), to postmodern death (Finnegans Wake). And yet, however exemplary these texts may be, they obviously have not brought about an end to the novel, the report of whose death has always been greatly exaggerated. More examples of it are being written than ever before, and literary language may yet prove inexhaustible or at least infinitely recyclable.
What remains strikingly exemplary about Joyce's work, though, is that it continues to lend itself surprisingly well to being an example of just about every literary theory. Critics never cease hailing Joyce as the prime example of their theory put into practice, as if his novels permitted us to look at them through whatever theoretical lens we like. Structuralism, semiotics, New Criticism, New Historicism, feminism, postcolonial studies, pretty much all of narratology, and anything roughly considered poststructuralism – including Lacanian psychoanalysis and deconstruction – have all turned to Joyce as an example.
16 - Feminism and deconstruction
- from GENDER AND SEXUALITY
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- By Diane Elam
- Edited by Christa Knellwolf, Australian National University, Canberra, Christopher Norris, University of Wales College of Cardiff
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2001, pp 207-216
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Summary
Feminism and deconstruction have influenced literary criticism by rethinking the terms of sexual difference, politics and ethics. Emphasising indeterminacy, the openness of interpretation and the importance of difference, their alliance has given rise to powerful interrogations of representations of women across a range of literary fields.
While the alliance between feminism and deconstruction is acknowledged by literary criticism, there is not a simple formula for how they work together. Their relationship takes a variety of shapes, partially because feminism and deconstruction continuously redefine one another. The resulting instability produces a fluid relationship, in which neither term is subordinated.
It is important to note, though, that however many shapes it has the potential to take, the alliance between feminism and deconstruction was initially met with scepticism. In what is probably one of the clearest statements he has ever made, Jacques Derrida claimed that ‘deconstruction is certainly not feminist … if there is one thing that it must not come to, it's feminism’. For Derrida, feminism ‘is the operation through which a woman desires to be like a man, like a dogmatic philosopher, demanding truth, science, objectivity’. Feminism is therefore accused of eliding difference and judged to be just another form of western metaphysics, pinning its hopes on truth and objectivity.
If Derrida has tried to push feminism away from deconstruction, a number of feminists have also attempted to push deconstruction away from feminism, although for a different set of reasons. Deconstruction is against feminism, according to Denise Riley, because it has ‘no political allegiances’.