Title: Adultery-Within-Marriage: Joyce's Love Plot
Abstract: Janine Utell's James Joyce and the Revolt of Love explores why Joyce came to see adultery as a part of conjugal life and not as a unique site for passionate love. Utell argues that Joyce moved away from dramatizing the story of adultery as the model of a rebellious love; instead, he presented adultery as an ethical problem that can be solved within marriage, in which each partner must be reconciled to the other's right to sexual desire outside the margins of marriage. She supports her argument by applying to Joyce's adultery narratives the postmodern concept of alterity, the idea that men and women cannot be fully known or appropriated as sexual beings. Utell also addresses the significance of Joyce's adultery-within-marriage narrative for a theory of comedy. She demonstrates that Finnegans Wake posits an older couple, educated in the ethics of desire, as a model for comic reconciliation.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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