Derrida and Joyce

The conjunction of James Joyce and Jacques Derrida brings together what many would consider to be the arch representative of high modernism with the signal figure of postmodernism, a writer who authored some of the boldest experiments with the English language with a thinker who reinvented theory as deconstruction and ineradicably changed the way texts are read, studied, and written. Even within the singular history of encounters between philosophy and literature—Heidegger and Holderlin, Benjamin and Baudelaire, Sartre and Genet, to name only a few—the Derrida and Joyce relation would still hold a special place. Derrida does not comment upon Joyce (even when engaged in seemingly straightforward exegesis), but thinks with him, through him, and allows Joyce a shaping hand in his own set of philosophical concerns. While Derrida has perhaps devoted more pages in his oeuvre to other literary figures (Mallarme and Celan immediately come to mind), there is no one to whom he has returned more often and across such a great variety of works in the course of an almost forty year engagement. Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts brings together all of Derrida’s published writings on Joyce, in fresh, new translations, along with essays in interpretation of this engagement. In regard to Derrida’s texts, our volume features the first complete translation of Derrida’s book Ulysses Gramophone,