Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism offers for the first time a sustained exploration of parallels between the fiction of James Joyce and the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin is perhaps modernism’s most eloquent theorist, Joyce its finest writer of fiction; both haunted the same Paris streets at the height of the modernist moment, and both developed accounts of the flaneur’s encounter with the city, with commodity culture and with others, that were revolutionary in their day and continue to set the agendas for culture and cultural critique. To place some of the work of each side by side is to make evident their affinities: the skills of each as new cartographers of the urban, the interest of each in ethnicity, nationalism, and exile, the way in which the ‘Profane illumination’ celebrated by Benjamin meets the ‘Epiphany’ of Joyce’s A Portrait, as each rethought the epistemology of insight in the modernist moment. This collection explores these parallels between two of the greatest modernists, casting the aesthetic strategies of Joyce in the light of the aesthetic critique of Benjamin, opening up the politics of the one in the light of those of the other, and discerning the parallels between Joyce’s version of a modern urban world in which self and society effect an uneasy rapprochement and Benjamin’s modernist scenarios in which the aura might still linger. This collection discovers extraordinary parallels between the two writers who, writing in Paris, offered new accounts of urban selfhood and survival to the world.
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Bibliographical Note
Enda Duffy and Maurizia Boscagli: Introduction: Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism
Douglas Mao: Arcadian Ithaca
Ellen Carol Jones: Memorial Dublin
Patrick McGee: The Communist Flâneur, or, Joyce’s Boredom
Maurizia Boscagli: Spectacle Reconsidered: Joycean Synaesthetics and the Dialectic of the Mutoscope
Graham MacPhee: Benjamin, Joyce and the Disappearance of the Dead
Enda Duffy: The Happy Ring House
Heyward Ehrlich: Joyce, Benjamin and the Futurity of Fiction
Scott Kaufman: “That Bantry Jobber:” William Martin Murphy and the Critique of Progress and Productivity in Ulysses
Paul K. Saint-Amour: The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis
