Author Biography

David Vichnar is assistant professor of critical and cultural theory in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION. JOYCE THE AVANT-
1. Preliminary notes on the novel, experiment, and the avant-garde
2. Joyce the avant-gardist: the Wake in transition
3. transition in the Wake: Joyce the transitionist
4. A Joycean avant-garde: parallax, metempsychosis, concretism, forgery, and neologism
5. Joycean (?) traditions: Hayman, Adams, Werner, Levitt
6. Post-Joyce

CHAPTER 1. JOYCE DE NOUVEAU:
"WITHIN OR BEHIND OR BEYOND OR ABOVE" THE NEW NOVEL, 1947–67
1.1 "Equivalent images, analogous sensations": Nathalie Sarraute
1.2 "The Additional Step in Subverting the System": Alain Robbe-Grillet
1.3 "Forever advancing on shifting sands": Claude Simon
1.4 "Anamnesis of leitmotifs": Robert Pinget
1.5 "To fail this way, in a superhuman attempt": Claude Mauriac
1.6 "Do whatever you can to get the most out of it": Michel Butor

CHAPTER 2. "BUT HOW MANY HAVE FOLLOWED HIM?"
JOYCE IN BRITAIN, 1955–75
2.1 "A horroshow crack on the ooko or earhole": Anthony Burgess
2.2 "The Einstein of the novel": B. S. Johnson
2.3 "This distanced technique of writing from the unconscious": Alan Burns
2.4 "The voyce crying in the wilderness, rejoice with me": Brigid Brophy
2.5 "A death wish and a sense of sin": Ann Quin
2.6 "Who's she when she's (not) at home": Christine Brooke-Rose, 1964–75

CHAPTER 3. MAKING JOYCE "PART OF THE LANDSCAPE":
AMERICAN LITERARY EXPERIMENT, 1953–1973
3.1 "A new mythology for the space age": William S. Burroughs
3.2 "The self who could do more": William Gaddis
3.3 "That style which deliberately exhausts its possibilities": John Barth
3.4 "Never cut when you can paste": William H. Gass
3.5 "The book remains problematic, unexhausted": Donald Barthelme
3.6 "Orpheus Puts Down Harp": Thomas Pynchon

CHAPTER 4. JOYCEAN OULIPO, OULIPIAN JOYCE
4.1 The joys of constraint and potential
4.2 "Nothing left to chance": Raymond Queneau
4.3 "A man of letters": Georges Perec
4.4 "A pre-modern, encyclopedic cast of mind": Harry Mathews
4.5 "The Babel effect": Jacques Roubaud
4.6 The anticipatory plagiarist

CHAPTER 5. "THE CENTENARIAN STILL SEEMS AVANT-GARDE":
EXPERIMENT IN BRITISH FICTION, 1976–2006
5.0 "Of the dissolution of character": Christine Brooke-Rose, 1984–2006
5.1 "Life's too shored to embark on it now": Brian W. Aldiss
5.2 "Packed with meaningless local references": J.G. Ballard
5.3 "A polyglot babble like a symphonic Euro-language": Angela Carter
5.4 "Realism is anti-art": Jeanette Winterson
5.5 "Great art should not move": Alasdair Gray
5.6 "Grafting, editing: quotations, correspondences": Iain Sinclair

CHAPTER 6. "THE FUNNYMENTAL NOVEL OF OUR ERROR":
JOYCEAN AVANT-GARDE IN U.S. FICTION, 1973–1997
6.0 "'Realism,' the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought": Language poetry
6.1 "That level of activity that reveals life as fiction": Raymond Federman
6.2 "A novel as a concrete structure rather than an allegory": Ronald Sukenick
6.3 "Another awareness, another alphabet": Walter Abish
6.4 "The parodying punning pre-Joycean cakewalk": Ishmael Reed
6.5 "Does language control like money?": Kathy Acker
6.6 "The joyous heresy that will not go away": Gilbert Sorrentino

CHAPTER 7. JOYCE AS SUCH / TEL QUEL JOYCE
7.1 Tel Quel's "Enigmatic Reserve"
7.2 "A certain type of Excess": Jean-Louis Houdebine
7.3 "Dis: Yes – I.R.A.": Maurice Roche
7.4 "As close as possible to that unheard-of place": Hélène Cixous
7.5 "A subject illimitable, numberless": Philippe Sollers
7.6 "An avatar of catholicity": Beyond Tel Quel

CHAPTER 8. POST-2000 CODA: CONCEPTUAL JOYCE
8.1 "Misinterpreting the avant-garde": Raczymow, Hadengue, Levé
8.2 Breaking "the recursive loops of realism": Mitchell, Hall, Home, Moore
8.3 "Crucial to the health of the ecosystem": Amerika, Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski, Cohen

CONCLUSION. JOYCE THE POST-
1. Countersigning Joyce's signature
2. A Joycean postmodernism: "Rituals originating in piety"
3. Joycean anti-postmodernists
4. Revis(it)ing the Joycean tradition: "His producers are they not his consumers?"
5. Genealogies of parallax, metempsychosis, trace, forgery, and neologism
6. Joyce's baroque error: "One more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at"

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