Joycean Possibilities: A Margot Norris Legacy

Edited by Joseph Valente, Vicki Mahaffey, Kezia Whiting

Publication date:

06 December 2022

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781839981005

This volume proposes to honor the trenchant, influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in essays that amplify her illumination of Joyce’s oeuvre. The common denominator running through her work is her openness to Joyce’s various modes of innovation; she pioneered alternative ways of regarding his fiction, the readers it addresses, the narrative and generic forms it alters, the world to which it refers, and the nature of the socio-historical status quo it exposes. These categories anchor and organize the collection: Joyce’s textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories (including those of women), and variegated readerships.

Preface; Part I, Introduction: Margot Norris and the Ideal of Interpretive Possibility; Part II Personal Testimonies; Part III Suspicious Readings; Part IV Joyce’s Webs; Part V The Value of James Joyce: Ethico-Political Readings; Part VI Possible Worlds; Part VII Epilogue; Index

“If Joyce contains multitudes of readings shaped by decades of critical approaches, how to make sense of texts and interpretations that both contain and do not contain themselves? Margo Norris solves the paradox by opening Joyce to more and more potentialities; her progressive opening of the critical frame has inspired generations of readers, as this marvelous and exciting collection written by the best scholars in the field amply shows” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.