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James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare, by Robert Spoo. Oxford U. Press, 1994." Pp. xii + 195.
Recent inquiries into the elements of popular culture and politics in James Joyce's works have brought an awareness of his deep concern with matters cultural and historical. Various studies of Joyce have explored the appearance in his work of advertising (Jennifer Wicke, Garry Leonard), popular fiction and literature (R. B. Kershner), the press, the theater and the pulpit (Cheryl Herr), and issues of nationalism and imperialism (Enda Duffy, James Fairhall, Emer Nolan and Vince Cheng). While these studies have called on a number of theoretical schools to supply their frameworks, they have all taken a more or less materialist approach in their examination of their subject areas. Robert Spoo acknowledges the importance of this scholarship in his new book, James Joyce and the Language of History, an intriguing and valuable addition to the growing field of Joycean historiography and cultural analysis, but he consciously wishes to go in a different direction. In setting out his area of study, Spoo remarks, "there have been relatively fewsustained efforts, and no book length attempt, to examine the problem of history in Ulysses, and to situate that problem within the philosophical and cultural contexts that shaped Joyce's ideas and generated the discourses of history present in his text" (6). While most historiographie studies of Joyce concentrate on popular culture in Dublin, the focus here is on Stephen Dedalus, the young artist and the double of Joyce, whose aesthetic practice Spoo figures as a response to, and an escape from, the oppressive burden of the past. The burden is most easily characterized by Stephen's famous phrase from the "Nestor" episode of Ulysses, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," which supplies the book's subtitle as well as its most basic structure: entrapment by an oppressive narrative and the desire to escape from it. Rather than the Everyman, everyday world of Leopold Bloom, Spoo examines Stephen's affinity for "high culture" as the basis for an historiographie reading of Joyce's texts. The formidable aim of the book is to place Joyce's writing within "the context of European intellectual history- primarily nineteenth-century historical and aesthetic theory" and explore his...