Patrick McGee

"Anyone who writes on Joyce will have to take this book into account. I predict that future Joyce criticism will echo with McGee's insights about Joyce and history."-- John Paul Riquelme, Boston University "A valuable collection from an important critic and major presence in studies of James Joyce. It takes an exceptional mind and sensibility to make a book worth reading and worth examining--worth thinking about. Patrick McGee has those qualities, and we see them pervading every essay in this volume."-- Morris Beja, Ohio State University Joyce Beyond Marx brings together 11 essays and a new introduction by internationally respected Joyce scholar Patrick McGee. While a number of the pieces have been previously published, McGee has extensively revised them, integrated them with substantial new material, and produced a unified collection that examines the experimental fictions of James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, from the perspective of cultural materialism. Offering a critique of the class politics of contemporary Joyce studies, McGee insists that Joyce's later work be understood in the context of the general political economy, or conditions of production, that underlies both Joyce's career and his critical reputation. He relates debates over pedagogy and the critical editions of Joyce's works to his situation as a colonial and postcolonial subject and as a critic of the social, economic, and ethical values of capitalism. In his groundbreaking view of Joyce's politics, McGee offers a new way to understand Joyce's attitude toward violence and social change and his response to the Irish revolution and civil war. A final long essay lays out the implicit theory of social and cultural revolution in the Wake. While especially valuable to scholars of modern literature and critical theory, the work also will be important to readers in a range of fields, including politics, education, psychoanalysis, feminist and gender theory, ethics, and postcolonial theory. Patrick McGee, professor of English at Louisiana State University, is the author of many articles on Joyce, film, and cultural theory. His most recent books are Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race and Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture.

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.