How does recent scholarship on ethnicity and race speak to the Jewish
dimension of James Joyce's writing? What light has Joyce himself already
cast on the complex question of their relationship? This book poses
these questions in terms of models of the other drawn from
psychoanalytic and cultural studies and from Jewish cultural studies,
arguing that in Joyce the emblematic figure of otherness is "the Jew."
The work of Emmanuel Levinas, Sander Gilman, Gillian Rose, Homi Bhabha,
among others, is brought to bear on the literature, by Jews and non-Jews
alike, that has forged the representation of Jews and Judaism in this
century. Joyce was familiar with this literature, like that of Theodor
Herzl. Joyce sholarship has largely neglected even these sources,
however, including Max Nordau, who contributed significantly to the
philosophy of Zionism, and the literature on the "psychobiology" of
race--so prominent in the fin de siècle--all of which circulates around
and through Joyce's depictions of Jews and Jewishness.
Several Joyce scholars have shown the significance of the concept of the
other for Joyce's work and, more recently, have employed a variety of
approaches from within contemporary deliberations of the ideology of
race, gender, and nationality to illuminate its impact. The author
combines these approaches to demonstrate how any modern characterization
of otherness must be informed by historical representations of "the Jew"
and, consequently, by the history of anti-Semitism. She does so through
a thematics and poetics of Jewishness that together form a discourse and
method for Joyce's novel.
