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Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions. Wolfgang Streit. Ann Arbor:The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 229. $65.00 (cloth).
Since the 1995 publication of Kathleen Ferns' James Joyce and the Burden of Disease, the subject of Joyce's unresolved conflict with Catholicism and its promotion of absolute confession has been put back on the agenda of Joyce criticism. In his Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions, Wolfgang Streit now offers a novel interpretation of Joyce s conflicted obsession with the confessional. Given the Catholic upbringing of the Irish writer it is indeed surprising that no book-length study on the subject of sexual confession has been written before. Yet as its title suggests, and despite occasional references to the troubling impact of Catholic authority in Ireland, Streit s study does not rely on biography but on a Foucauldian framework in the analysis of Joyce's texts, listing among the conventional readings of Joyce's four major prose books, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and also the less-studied texts Chamber Music and Exiles. The latter are particularly welcome, not only because their inclusion gives credit to Joyce's "lesser texts," but it also confirms Streit s argument that Joyce's struggle with sexual confessions was truly an ongoing one.
Essentially, the argument of Joyce/Foucault is that throughout his oeuvre Joyce developed a sustained and complex resistance to both the confession as an institution...