By Hugh Kenner
ISBN: 9781564784285
Publication Date: 1/1/2007
When a correspondent from Missouri wrote to Hugh Kenner and asked that he elaborate on his assertion that "Joyce began Ulysses in naturalism and ended it in parody," Kenner answered with this book. Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists—Joyce foremost among them—found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding—and enjoying more fully—the work of one of the world's greatest writers.
Reviews
"An original and entertaining study of, chiefly, Ulysses . . . This is a most stimulating book." —Anthony Burgess
"As always, Kenner is original, provocative, stimulating, occasionally perverse, and immensely readable . . . The book offers important new insights into Joyce's art.” —Library Journal
"The volume is easy to handle and a delight to read. And Kenner's leaping wit, his metaphors, his transitions from insight to insight, his lively attention to Joyce's invention—these qualities make it difficult, if you pick it up one evening, not to finish it before turning off the light.” —National Review
Biographical Information
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was perhaps the greatest Anglophone literary critic of the 20th century: no other figure has been so instrumental in our understanding of modernism and its key figures, or so crucial to the development of new ways to think about new literature. Kenner taught at UC Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Georgia.