Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Après mot, le déluge: the ego as symptom
- 2 The ego, the nation, and degeneration
- 3 Joyce the egoist
- 4 The esthetic paradoxes of egoism: from negoism to the theoretic
- 5 Theory's slice of life
- 6 The egoist vs. the king
- 7 The conquest of Paris
- 8 Joyce's transitional revolution
- 9 Hospitality and sodomy
- 10 Hospitality in the capital city
- 11 Joyce's late Modernism and the birth of the genetic reader
- 12 Stewardship, Parnellism, and egotism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The conquest of Paris
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Après mot, le déluge: the ego as symptom
- 2 The ego, the nation, and degeneration
- 3 Joyce the egoist
- 4 The esthetic paradoxes of egoism: from negoism to the theoretic
- 5 Theory's slice of life
- 6 The egoist vs. the king
- 7 The conquest of Paris
- 8 Joyce's transitional revolution
- 9 Hospitality and sodomy
- 10 Hospitality in the capital city
- 11 Joyce's late Modernism and the birth of the genetic reader
- 12 Stewardship, Parnellism, and egotism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognizes its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches …
James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist” (1904)The men care for their hair like women; this is a reproach brought against the effeminate Paris by Hector and Diomed.
Giambattista Vico, The New ScienceOne focus of this book is an investigation of the overdetermined links between Joyce and the Parisian avant-garde of the late twenties, of his often tortuous negotiations between an international Modernism and an ethical sense he kept of his being above all an Irish writer in exile. I have to admit that an earlier investigation had been motivated by a wish to ascertain whether Joyce's decision to stay in Paris at the time of the completion of Ulysses had been no more than a strategic move, or whether he had indeed found a congenial atmosphere of artistic experimentation. I would now like to investigate whether Joyce did not so much wish to present himself as a “Parisian” as to identify himself more subtly with Paris, the Trojan hero and archetype of the seducer in the Greco-Roman world – for Vico, as I will show in chapter 9, the prototype of the arch-villain because he breaks the most fundamental law, the unwritten law of hospitality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism , pp. 131 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001