Joyce's Voices - Softcover

Kenner, Hugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520039351 ISBN 13: 9780520039353

Publisher: University of California Press, 1979

Synopsis

When a "correspondent from Missouri," wrote to Hugh Kenner and asked that he elaborate on his assertion that "Joyce began Ulysses in naturalism and ended it in parody," Kenner answered with this book. Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

About this title

About the Author:

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was one of America's great literary critics. He wrote on a range of subjects that includes Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and geodesic domes.

Review:

"The volume is easy to handle and a delight to read. And Kenner's leaping wit, his metaphors, his transitions from insight to insight, his lively attention to Joyce's invention these qualities make it difficult, if you pick it up one evening, not to finish it before turning off the light." --Donald Hall, National Review

"Kenner's work is an achievement of a polymath: it ranges from Jonathan Swift to Flaubert, and from Dickens to T. S. Eliot, circling around its two main concerns: Joyce's Ulysses and the death of objectivity as a privileged style in modern literature." --Choice

"As always, Kenner is original, provocative, stimulating, occasionally perverse, and immensely readable. . . . The book offers important new insights into Joyce's art." --Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0520039351
• ISBN 13: 9780520039353
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 136