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SPOO, ROBERT. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 195 pp. $39.95.
As Robert Spoo points out in his introduction, in writing a book about Joyce and history he is not exactly entering uncharted waters. "Joyce criticism has long recognized the thematic importance of history in Ulysses" and "the problematic status of historical experience in Joyce's fiction" (p. 6). What Spoo's innovative and astute study offers is a discussion of history as "more than just as theme," but rather, as "a condition of the novel's aesthetic production" (p. 4). His project is to "show how dominant notions of history are figured and resisted in the Joycean text" (p. 9) by demonstrating that the structure, style, and language of Ulysses incorporate and challenge the different narratives through which Joyce's predecessors and contemporaries constructed and controlled the form and meaning of history.
Spoo identifies Leopold Bloom with popular culture and "the bourgeois world," and Stephen Dedalus with "intellectual, 'high culture"' (p. 9); that distinction, given Spoo's decision to privilege Stephen over Bloom, means that his study is methodologically more traditional than some of the recent Joyce scholarship he refers to in his introduction (p. 9). Although Spoo clearly demonstrates his familiarity with recent developments in Joyce criticism and contemporary theory, and he does invoke names like Foucault and Barthes while developing his conceptions of metahistory, he is less concerned with entering current theoretical debates than with tracing the influence of "historians and philosophers of history whose ideas formed part of Joyce's intellectual culture" (p. 9). That decision to privilege "high culture" intertexts is addressed in his introduction, which consciously positions James Joyce and the Language of History as part of a critical tradition that he believes "complements, but differs markedly from" the cultural studies work of scholars like Cheryl Herr and Jennifer Wicke (p. 9).
Having marked out his critical territory, Spoo covers it admirably. The argument draws upon a wide range of sources that Spoo claims influence Joyce's fiction either directly or indirectly: pedagogical texts that shape the young Stephen's conception of history in Portrait, the works of...