Religion & Literature 160 points out small allusive patterns in the Wake, reads those concerns back into Joyce’s larger body of work, and returns to show the prevalence of each theme in the Wake as signaling larger Irish cultural and social experiences from the 1920s and 1930s. Van Mierlo sets Issy’s response to her brother Shaun’s sermonizing next to the “Naussica” episode of Ulysses in order to highlight the extent to which women in the Wake are “subject to the terms of a religious culture that promotes a range of conflicting, and therefore often impossible, ideals” (105). Issy, however, repeatedly manages to “outwit her interlocutors with her slippery language, often appropriating images from the very religious culture that seeks to contain her” (117). Joyce depicts that culture as growing even more constrictive in Book IV of the Wake, which offers a vision of Ireland shaped by the Catholic agenda of De Valera’s conservative 1937 constitution. Van Mierlo reads the final pages of the Wake as evoking the new constitution and its articulation of “the permanence of the marriage vow”; if Ireland reawakens in Book IV as a new member of the nations of Europe, it also finds itself in “a scenario whereby one dogmatic system of thought simply cedes to another” (131). Though she insists on the Wake’s refusal “to assert a coherent counter-theology or philosophy with which to confront or combat dogma,” Van Mierlo repeatedly returns to the immediacy and intimacy of the novel’s language (49). The cultural frames of reference uncovered in James Joyce and Catholicism may not bring to light a clear position from which Joyce believed dogma could be overturned, but Van Mierlo leads the Wake’s readers to witness a wider spectrum of human experiences within and creative responses to those modes of Catholic belief. Nikhil Gupta University of Michigan Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology M. Cooper Harriss New York University Press, 2017. xi + 265 pp. $30 cloth. Literature sings through allusions. At its best, literature mobilizes the sounds, connotations, and denotations of language to help us see and feel the world anew, and to imagine it otherwise. Ralph Ellison’s fiction is rich in allusions, not only on the surface but at its very core. Scholarly analysis, with its imperative to break apart, categorize, and explain, would seem to do a disservice to Ellison’s texts, pulling away from what gives them great- BOOK REVIEWS 161 ness. M. Cooper Harriss proves this need not be so. His brings varied tools of scholarship, from archival research to cultural studies to close reading to theorizing, and directs them at Ellison’s allusions. In a sense, Harriss takes Ellison on his own terms in a way that few critics take their objects of criticism , in a way that seems apt in a moment when criticism looks to push beyond “the limits of critique,” holding up for appreciation the allusions dear to Ellison, calling attention to their power rather than explaining them away. Central to Harriss’s study, and its organizing concept, is invisibility. Urging readers to think beyond the anodyne reduction of invisibility to that which is overlooked, Harriss tracks the way Invisible Man resonates with Biblical passages mentioning invisibility, with Enlightenment anxieties around invisibility , with invisibility in indigenous African traditions, and with invisibility as it circulates in popular culture today, for example around the ethics of drone warfare. Ellison knew his Bible well, but he likely did not have all of the Biblical instances of invisibility that Harriss points to in mind, nor did he know all the other sources to which Harriss points. But that is irrelevant: Harriss is following Ellison’s lead in opening the great author’s work to the cultural texts that form it and to which it responds, and Harriss uses Invisible Man to speak to concerns of the present. In this way, Harriss’s book takes seriously the richest sense of invisibility: what is visible in Ellison’s texts is less important that what is present but unseen, the way Ellison’s texts intervene in specific cultural landscapes. For Harriss, a very important but previously neglected aspect of Ellison’s biographical and textual world...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jul 14, 2024
Elizabeth Joan Abele 
Open Access