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Everyman's Joyce
“Pablo Picasso dismissed James Joyce as an obscure writer that all the world can understand.”
Through the power of illustration the Everyman’s Series illuminates complex bodies of work by some of the 20th century’s most vital thinkers. Picasso’s assessment of James Joyce as a writer that “all the world can understand” speaks to how a perspective that favors the visual can see through dense texts, allowing meaning to take shape.
W. Terrence Gordon’s examination of the James Joyce canon and its impact on the world, both in terms of literature and culture at large, provides accessible and singular evaluations of why Joyce, no matter how impenetrable his books may seem on the surface, continues to attract readers today. In Everyman's Joyce , Gordon’s close readings and biographical insight gel with contemporary visual cues that usher Joyce into the 21st century.
Through the power of illustration the Everyman’s Series illuminates complex bodies of work by some of the 20th century’s most vital thinkers. Picasso’s assessment of James Joyce as a writer that “all the world can understand” speaks to how a perspective that favors the visual can see through dense texts, allowing meaning to take shape.
W. Terrence Gordon’s examination of the James Joyce canon and its impact on the world, both in terms of literature and culture at large, provides accessible and singular evaluations of why Joyce, no matter how impenetrable his books may seem on the surface, continues to attract readers today. In Everyman's Joyce , Gordon’s close readings and biographical insight gel with contemporary visual cues that usher Joyce into the 21st century.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 30, 2019
Joycean prose upon glossy graphics
What this is is a linguist's (W. Terrence Gordon) take on the language of James Joyce artfully arranged on top of colored pages with glossy photos of things pertinent or not, of things Joycean or not, in the spirit more or less of the Great Wordsmith. However…
Some of the text cannot be read with these old eyes in the light that even God and his Sun have given us. The photons bounce; and dark on dark does not sooth since the meaning of the words is unclear since the words can hardly be seen. Let's face it I do not like colored text on colored pages: it's hard to read, and Joyce is hard enough black on white.
But there is a certain beauty in the words so arranged and obscured and selected out of all the mighty lines that Joyce bequest to us, and clearly the spirit of the oeuvre is there. Gordon gives us a little of The Works: Dubliners (among "The Dead"--and BTW did you know they made a film of "The Dead"), The Portrait of the "Hero" as a Young Man, One Day in the Life Of… with Dedalus and Mulligan and Molly and the Bloom being off the rose, and on to the weirdness and the utter abandonment of the poetic Wake (without the apostrophe). For yes Joyce was a poet (and we learn herein that he was also a playwright of Exiles) whose influence extended to particle physics in a quarky way…
And yes it takes a linguist to translate Joyce who ironically wrote of, with ornate and lavish prose, the banalities of our lives. Speaking of which, on page--well, there are no page numbers--there's an unglamorous photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses while seated upon a child's merry-go-round in a bathing suit in a playground.
But the text, ah the text, the words of so many stories, musings, and meanderings among the vowels and consonants of our minds and days and it's time now boys and how voices echo and Molly does Bloom and Mulligan likes his stew with animal parts rich and fragrant with manliness and one begins with the stolid, conventional prose of Dubliners or the carefully wrought remembrance of The Portrait, all the while thinking of the Day of Ulysses and the end and the beginning of the wordsome flights and fancies of the Wake.
Toward the end Gordon has some advice for those who would read Joyce: read aloud and read faster than you might want. If you do, the meaning of the words in Finnegans Wake may resonate into coherence as in "wish for a muddy kissmans" becoming "wish for a Merry Christmas."
At any rate, this is a tribute to Joyce and his works and his influence which was strangely considerable, and a book that literary types may find bemusing. For myself I was edified.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
What this is is a linguist's (W. Terrence Gordon) take on the language of James Joyce artfully arranged on top of colored pages with glossy photos of things pertinent or not, of things Joycean or not, in the spirit more or less of the Great Wordsmith. However…
Some of the text cannot be read with these old eyes in the light that even God and his Sun have given us. The photons bounce; and dark on dark does not sooth since the meaning of the words is unclear since the words can hardly be seen. Let's face it I do not like colored text on colored pages: it's hard to read, and Joyce is hard enough black on white.
But there is a certain beauty in the words so arranged and obscured and selected out of all the mighty lines that Joyce bequest to us, and clearly the spirit of the oeuvre is there. Gordon gives us a little of The Works: Dubliners (among "The Dead"--and BTW did you know they made a film of "The Dead"), The Portrait of the "Hero" as a Young Man, One Day in the Life Of… with Dedalus and Mulligan and Molly and the Bloom being off the rose, and on to the weirdness and the utter abandonment of the poetic Wake (without the apostrophe). For yes Joyce was a poet (and we learn herein that he was also a playwright of Exiles) whose influence extended to particle physics in a quarky way…
And yes it takes a linguist to translate Joyce who ironically wrote of, with ornate and lavish prose, the banalities of our lives. Speaking of which, on page--well, there are no page numbers--there's an unglamorous photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses while seated upon a child's merry-go-round in a bathing suit in a playground.
But the text, ah the text, the words of so many stories, musings, and meanderings among the vowels and consonants of our minds and days and it's time now boys and how voices echo and Molly does Bloom and Mulligan likes his stew with animal parts rich and fragrant with manliness and one begins with the stolid, conventional prose of Dubliners or the carefully wrought remembrance of The Portrait, all the while thinking of the Day of Ulysses and the end and the beginning of the wordsome flights and fancies of the Wake.
Toward the end Gordon has some advice for those who would read Joyce: read aloud and read faster than you might want. If you do, the meaning of the words in Finnegans Wake may resonate into coherence as in "wish for a muddy kissmans" becoming "wish for a Merry Christmas."
At any rate, this is a tribute to Joyce and his works and his influence which was strangely considerable, and a book that literary types may find bemusing. For myself I was edified.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
November 15, 2022
A fine art book and study, trying to give a visual to the extremely dense text of James Joyce
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews