Joyce's Iritis and the Irritated Text: The Dis-lexic
Ulysses
by Roy Gottfried
Foreword by Bernard Benstock
SAMLA Book Award Winner, 1995
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Ulysses was written and proofread when James Joyce's vision was seriously blurred and impaired by
iritis. The illness required him to use a magnifying glass to enlarge words, separating them out of context and distorting the simple letters in them. This book is the first study to consider the undermining effects of Joyce's iritis on the text of
Ulysses.
Gottfried examines Ulysses much as Joyce must have tried to see it, in close readings of many small portions of the text, and with a quizzical eye. He locates the particular density and opacity of
Ulysses in two sites: within the iritis in Joyce's eyes and within the body of the text with its irritated confusion of letters.
"No reader's eye can be trusted in seeing Ulysses," Gottfried claims. Instead, the reader is disoriented and infected with a particular kind of "Joycean dis-lexia," so that "a variety of instabilities arise from the reader's unclear view and reading of the novel."
Roy Gottfried is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of
The Art of Joyce's Syntax in "Ulysses" and of articles and reviews in the
James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Literary Supplement, and Joyce
Broadsheet.
The Florida James Joyce Series
1995. 208pp. 6 X 9. Notes, bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1404-2 Cloth, $49.95s
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"A critical tour de force that combines deft close readings and subtle theoretical speculation in an illuminating and original examination of one of modernism's central texts. . . . [Establishes] with convincing force the far-reaching implications of Joyce's physical problems in seeing for the
composition and interpretation of
Ulysses."--Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia, and chair, SAMLA Book Award Committee
"Delightful reading, involving the reader in the conspiracy of savoring minute details as part of a constantly developing overall pattern. No one has as yet provided so fine a mesh for containing the essentials of Joyce's
Ulysses."--Bernard Benstock, University of Miami
"Gottfried has settled upon a highly evocative metaphor that delineates the complex intellectual operations of the composition and the interpretation of a sophisticated work of art. . . . From that specificity he is able to draw a fully generalized and illuminating view of the
novel."--Michael Patrick Gillespie, Marquette University
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