Title
European Joyce Studies 21: Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism [Review of the book European Joyce studies 21: Joyce, Benjamin and magical urbanism, by M. Boscagli & E. Duffy, Ed.]
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Fall 2012
Abstract
This collection marks a major chapter in the ongoing belated encounter between James Joyce and the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. In the 1930s, both writers lived in Paris and shared a veritable Venn diagram of overlapping friends and acquaintances—Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Stuart Gilbert, and Gisèle Freund, to name a few—but apparently never met each other. As Heyward Ehrlich reports in this volume, Benjamin heard the story of Joyce’s infamous meeting with Marcel Proust through Monnier and Léon-Paul Fargue (192), which, in the version that William Carlos Williams told, anticlimactically consisted of the writers complaining about their respective physical ailments (JJII 508). The meeting that this collection stages is, by happy contrast, an intellectual feast with Joyce and Benjamin as the honored guests, one that not only deeply engages the work of both writers in relation to each other but also confirms that to read Joyce alongside Benjamin is to discover unique new elements and interpretations of Joyce that prevailing literary methodologies have failed to uncover.
Identifier
10.1353/jjq.2012.0088
Publisher
University of Tulsa
City
Tulsa, OK
Repository Citation
Rando, D. (2012). European Joyce studies 21: Joyce, Benjamin and magical urbanism [Review of the book European Joyce studies 21: Joyce, Benjamin and magical urbanism, by M. Boscagli & E. Duffy, Ed.]. James Joyce Quarterly, 50(1/2), 524-528. doi:10.1353/jjq.2012.0088
Publication Information
James Joyce Quarterly