"No one yet has made Joyce's sponging ways so very, very interesting, or
so important. Tony Thwaites takes the notions of promise, debt,
mortgage, and signature forward to where no critic has yet gone, and
back into the Joyce works to their new illumination. [He] demonstrates
in lucid and engaging prose how the promise--a deferral founded on a
certain notion of both past and future--structures Joyce's
works."--Eloise Knowlton, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan
In arguing that James Joyce's writing is structured everywhere by the
peculiar temporalities of the promise--the not yet of speculation--and
the signature that carries it, Tony Thwaites casts new light on a number
of debates in Joyce studies and narrative theory.
He maintains that to read Joyce is to be caught up in the pleasures of
the promise but also by the frustrations of knowing that a promise
remains a promise only as long as it doesn't (yet) deliver. In both the
personal experience of reading Joyce and in Joyce's life, with its
perpetual cycles of debt and wasteful spending, the promise is where
things remain open to the future. Not only in the convoluted history of
its publication but also in the structures of the writing, Joyce's work
involves intricate delays, overbiddings, speculations, and promises.
Through readings ranging from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Thwaites
expands his analysis of this temporality into a discussion of the
temporalities of fiction and the effects of the subject in language.
Through this approach, Thwaites reframes a number of familiar critical
debates and issues--Joycean aesthetics and history, the "mythic"
parallels of Ulysses, the relationship of the interior monologue to
literary realism, the vexed figure of the narrator, and the endless
effects of signature and countersignature throughout the works.
Tony Thwaites writes on modernist literature, literary theory, and
cultural studies, and teaches at the University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Australia.