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Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism. Edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Edited by Susan Stanford Friedman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism. By Margot Norris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on "Penelope" and Cultural Studies. Edited by Richard Pearce. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses. By Jeffrey Segall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare. By Robert Spoo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
In the first two chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, the English Hibernophile Haines and the Irish skeptic Stephen Dedalus articulate successive conceptions of history that underscore its ambivalent impact upon the social context of the novel.
--I can quite understand that,
Haines
said calmly. An Irishman must think like that. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
As the narrative unfolds, one sees that these views grow out of the complementary influences of intra-textual dynamics and extra-textual cultural perceptions. This recognition in turn reshapes assumptions about reading Ulysses and about how the relation between history and fiction shapes the interpretive process.
Specifically, such multiplicity suggests that no matter how directive the narrative's subsequent depiction of specific historical events, personal conceptions of history exert profound influence upon the interpretation of Ulysses. Both Stephen and Haines characterize history as an invasive force, and anyone connected with the novel must confront the implications of its intrusion. Stephen, Haines, the reader--all use history to contextualize the narrative's fictional events--but each does so in a fashion that calls into question the objective integrity of the concept of history.
Haines, the English tourist determined to embrace Irish culture, finds himself at a loss when reminded that Ireland remains under the control of "
t
he imperial British state." Unwilling to take responsibility for his country's colonial exploitation and yet unable to deny its consequences, Haines falls back upon the defense of inevitability and disassociation. He views history as...