Joseph S. O’Leary

Joysis Crisis

Reading James Joyce, Theomasochistically

“Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word ‘wrestles with reality itself,’ resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: ‘an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.’ Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, ‘a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,’ to reveal the real. His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is ‘a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.’” — Ellen Carol Jones

Available from Amazon US, UK, JP, &c. Also available in e-book format for Apple and Kindle.

“O’Leary demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation of centuries of exegetical debate (and debaters).… Like the best scholarship, it bears rereading—the first time for the outline of how O’Leary proposes seeing the manifestation of the sacred within the secular in Joyce, the second time to admire how thoroughly and conscientiously he has gathered echoes of Joyce’s quest in hundreds of like-minded seekers.” —Garry Leonard