Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction: language(s) with a difference
- Chapter 2 Syntactic glides
- Chapter 3 ‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories
- Chapter 4 Madonnas of Modernism
- Chapter 5 Theoretical modelling: Joyce's women on display
- Chapter 6 The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze
- Chapter 7 ‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing
- Chapter 8 Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 9 Border disputes
- Chapter 10 Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Ex sterco Dantis: Dante's post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake
- Chapter 12 No symbols where none intended: Derrida's war at Finnegans Wake
- Works cited
- Index
Chapter 4 - Madonnas of Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction: language(s) with a difference
- Chapter 2 Syntactic glides
- Chapter 3 ‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories
- Chapter 4 Madonnas of Modernism
- Chapter 5 Theoretical modelling: Joyce's women on display
- Chapter 6 The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze
- Chapter 7 ‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing
- Chapter 8 Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 9 Border disputes
- Chapter 10 Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Ex sterco Dantis: Dante's post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake
- Chapter 12 No symbols where none intended: Derrida's war at Finnegans Wake
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Madonna
1. a former Italian style of address equivalent to madam.
2. (M-) the Virgin Mary; ‘Our Lady’; also, a picture or statue of the Virgin; as, Raphael painted many Madonnas.
(Webster's Dictionary)‘O rosa mistica, ora pro me!’
(SL 238; letter to Martha Fleischmann)Yes! Yes! Blessed Virgin Mary, I believe!
(Luis Buñuel, waking up after an erotic dream of the Virgin Mary)Love is at the centre of modern literature, and its role in a number of important modernist texts locates its cultural contexts all over the map: on the street, in the movie theatre, in religious devotion, in social history, in theology, and in a mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture where the sublime faces the obscene and passion confronts violence. The phenomena of love inform culture and haunt its subjects with temptations and taboos. The figures that I am naming ‘Madonnas of Modernism’ are female characters who are featured in secular modernist works as subjects and objects of desire. The path of love that these characters take includes resonances of mariolatry (the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary), mystical spirituality, and the cult of virginity (an investment of sacred powers, taboos, and social values across cultures).
The Madonnas of Modernism are particularly important in the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Joyce.
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- James Joyce and the Difference of Language , pp. 58 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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