Author Description

<b>Exploring the role of boundaries and limits in the<br>writing of James Joyce</b></p> <p> </p> <p><i>Beating the Bounds</i> examines the role<br>of boundaries and limits in James Joyce's later works, primarily <i>Finnegans Wake </i>but also <i>Ulysses </i>and other texts. Building on the<br>ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Giordano Bruno, and scholar Fritz<br>Senn, Roy Benjamin explains and reconciles Joyce's contrary tendencies to<br>establish and transgress limits.</p> <p>Benjamin<br>begins by contrasting Joyce's exploration of the artificial impositions of<br>ritual and political power with the writer's attention to natural boundaries of<br>rivers and mountains. The next section considers sexual, spiritual, and interpersonal<br>boundaries in the <i>Wake</i>. Benjamin then<br>discusses how Joyce simultaneously affirms and undermines the limits of<br>philosophy, geometry, and aesthetics. The final<br>section covers Joyce's representation of the boundaries imposed in cosmogonic<br>myths, the collision between the bounded medieval world and the boundless world<br>of modern science, and the drive to escape from the boundaries of place.</p>In<br>this detailed and original analysis, <i> </i>Benjamin demonstrates that in<br>Joyce's writing, the tendency to disintegrate into<br>chaos is countered by an urge to impose order. Benjamin's close readings put an<br>abundance of subjects in conversation through the concept of limits, showing<br>the <i>Wake</i>'s relevance to many<br>different fields of thought.</p> <p></p> <p> </p> <p>A<br>volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles</p>