DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

James Joyce and the Jesuits

Michael Mayo author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:16th Apr '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

James Joyce and the Jesuits cover

Fresh close readings and psychoanalytic theory demonstrate how Joyce turned practices he learned from the Jesuits into challenges for readers.

Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, the book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce. The book appeals to Joyce scholars and scholars interested in religion and Kleinian theory, as well as any general reader interested in Joyce.James Joyce was educated almost exclusively by the Jesuits; this education and these priests make their appearance across Joyce's oeuvre. This dynamic has never been properly explicated or rigorously explored. Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, this book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce's fiction. It takes readers through some of the canon's most well-read texts and produces bold, fresh new readings. By placing these readings in light of Jesuit religious practice - in particular, the Spiritual Exercises all Jesuit priests and many students undergo - the book shows how Joyce's deepest concerns about truth, literature, and love were shaped by these religious practices and texts. Joyce worked out his answers to these questions in his own texts, largely by forcing his readers to encounter, and perhaps answer, those questions themselves. Reading Joyce is a challenge not only in terms of interpretation but of experience - the confusion, boredom, and even paranoia readers feel when making their way through these texts.

'Michael Mayo's lucidly written, patiently reasoned James Joyce and the Jesuits argues that 'Joyce's work addresses itself to particular crises of belief and representation generated by Ignatius of Loyola' in his Spiritual Exercises (1522–1524)… Mayo leaves us with a highly compelling conceptual framework: one that others might well profit from and apply further in their own engagements with the frustrations and enigmas of Joyce's art, and also its playfulness.' James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 123

ISBN: 9781108495295

Dimensions: 235mm x 158mm x 18mm

Weight: 460g

234 pages