The Varieties of Joycean Experience

“In this superb collection of elegantly written essays, Tim Conley looks at Joyce’s texts through a variety of different perspectives in a clear and precise manner that takes Joyce’s whimsy seriously. Essential reading for all Joyceans.” — Sam Slote, Associate Professor, School of English, Trinity College Dublin

“Tim Conley’s The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a book of essays arranged as “ten toptypsical readings” – among them, “Cerebral,” “Mythamatical,” “Scatological,” “Metrological,” and “Hysterical-Exegetical.” The book’s title, a node to William James, and the book’s content, a nod to various aspects of Joycean criticism, reflect Conley’s broader, heterogeneous literary interests, articulated here with erudition and occasional levity. A pleasure to read.” — Jolanta Wawrzycka, Professor, Department of English, Radford University

“Tim Conley has established himself as a wide-ranging, provocative, and witty critic and scholar of James Joyce’s works. In ten demonstrations of Joycean experience, focused on Ulysses and mostly Finnegans Wake and each labeled straightforwardly (Narratological, Compositional, Meteorological) or whimsically (Mythametical), he explores such varied topics as the avant-garde, revision, consciousness, scatology and weather. The closing chapter, with its label of “Heretical-Exegetical” sounding like Hamlet’s Polonius or Ulysses’ “Ithaca” narrator, is a tour-de-force analysis of what Conley calls “specious, pathological, and even lunatic readings” that, because their authors sincerely believe their interpretations, come as close as anything in this commodious and rewarding book to William James’ varieties of religious experience.” — Michael Groden, author of The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce’s Ulysses