The Varieties of Joycean Experience

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The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce's works.

With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore such problems as the difficulties these books pose to categories and summaries and our understanding of Joyce's composition methods. The book explores Joyce's ambiguities around death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce's works. The book concludes with an examination of the tricky problem: what makes an interpretation untenable, and why do Joyce's works inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings

Reviews

In this superb collection of elegantly written essays, Tim Conley looks at Joyces texts through a variety of different perspectives in a clear and precise manner that takes Joyces whimsy seriously. Essential reading for all Joyceans. Sam Slote, Associate Professor, School of English, Trinity College Dublin

Tim Conleys The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a book of essays arranged as ten toptypsical readings among them, Cerebral, Mythamatical, Scatological, Metrological, and Hysterical-Exegetical. The books title, a node to William James, and the books content, a nod to various aspects of Joycean criticism, reflect Conleys broader, heterogeneous literary interests, articulated here with erudition and occasional levity. A pleasure to read. Jolanta Wawrzycka, Professor, Department of English, Radford University

Tim Conley has established himself as a wide-ranging, provocative, and witty critic and scholar of James Joyces works. In ten demonstrations of Joycean experience, focused on Ulysses and mostly Finnegans Wake and each labeled straightforwardly (Narratological, Compositional, Meteorological) or whimsically (Mythametical), he explores such varied topics as the avant-garde, revision, consciousness, scatology and weather. The closing chapter, with its label of Heretical-Exegetical sounding like Hamlets Polonius or Ulysses Ithaca narrator, is a tour-de-force analysis of what Conley calls specious, pathological, and even lunatic readings that, because their authors sincerely believe their interpretations, come as close as anything in this commodious and rewarding book to William James varieties of religious experience. Michael Groden, author of The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyces Ulysses

Author Bio

Tim Conley is Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University, Canada. His books include Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (co-edited with Jed Rasula), and Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations.