Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The treatment of Joyce by French theorists has often been called glib, offhand, mystifying, or not very accurate. Such, for instance, is the picture that emerges from Geert Lernout's groundbreaking and systematic overview, in The French Joyce, whose strictures have given a bad name to most of the “Joyce of French Theory” (Lernout 1990). It is not my intention to reopen the critical debate that followed this publication more than 15 years after the initial discussion, especially as I figure among the French Joy-ceans as an example of a critic who has been led astray by theory and then found a way back to a more rational or “scientific” approach by way of textual studies and genetic criticism (if not in quite so linear a path as this seems). Now that reception studies of Joyce have become more systematic and comprehensive (Lernout and Van Mierlo 2004), it is time to take a more distanced look back at a period dominated by theory, and one when, for some at least, theory was inevitably French. I will focus on two moments that repeat the same stakes, add up the same tally of losses and gains: the transition moment in the late 1920s and 30s and, more especially, the Tel Quel moment in the late 1960s and 70s. My aim will be to assess what these theoretical avant-gardes have brought to us today, beyond their historical value as testimonies to the interpenetration of experimentalism and ... log in or subscribe to read full text