Joyce, Bakhtin, and the literary tradition: toward a comparative cultural poetics

Abstract

Literary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work. Together, the comparative readings in these six chapters suggest a Joyce whose texts are very much in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people despite Joyce's extensive engagement with the literary tradition; a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality.