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Ulysses as Stephen's Novel Robert Spoo. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xi + 195 pp. $39.95
ROBERT SPOO'S BOOK on James Joyce and history begins with the old saw that Joyce, like his protagonist Stephen Dedalus, rejects history as "that nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Spoo describes Joyce's whole career as "a crusade against the historical Devourer." Although one might take issue with such sweeping pronouncements, the book as a work "devoted to Stephen and his struggle to awake from that nightmare" offers a new and interesting reappraisal of Dedalus's role in Ulysses. Spoo's study "rehabilitates Stephen as the novel's hero," offering an assessment of the character's engagement with the past shaped by his intellectual fervor.
Those intellectual sources range from Nietzsche's essays about historical obsession, the chains...