Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French

by Derek Attridge, Daniel Ferrer

This volume is devoted to translations of some of the most significant criticism of James Joyce to have appeared in French journals over the last twenty, years. Joyce has been a great stimulus for new modes of theoretical and critical inquiry in France, which have in turn exerted a profound influence on the intellectual climate both in the UK and in North America. In their shared preoccupations with the mechanisms of textuality and the implications thereof for the writing-and-reading subject, all the contributors to this volume, who include Hélène Cixous, Jacques Aubert, JeanMichel Rabaté, André Topia and Jacques Derrida, form part of the movement away from the structuralism that dominated intellectual discussion in the 1960s to what is now called (though not in France itself), 'post-structuralism'.

Paperback

First published January 31, 1985

About the author

Derek Attridge is a South African-born British literary scholar celebrated for his influential contributions to English literature, particularly in literary theory, poetic form, modernist fiction, and South African writing. He is especially noted for his work on James Joyce and J.M. Coetzee, and for his landmark study The Singularity of Literature, which won the European Society for the Study of English Book Award and has been translated into multiple languages. Across his career, Attridge has explored the ethical, rhythmic, and linguistic dimensions of literature, always emphasizing the transformative potential of reading.
He has authored or edited over thirty books and published scores of essays in journals and collections. His major works include The Rhythms of English Poetry, which challenged traditional approaches to poetic meter; Joyce Effects and How to Read Joyce, key texts for modernist studies; and J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, which has become a foundational text in Coetzee scholarship. His book The Experience of Poetry traces the reception of poetry from Homer to Shakespeare, while Forms of Modernist Fiction offers an ambitious study of the modernist novel, earning recognition as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
Attridge has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and research centers in the US, Europe, and South Africa. He has also held visiting professorships in universities across four continents. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy.
His editorial work includes influential volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Acts of Literature (featuring essays by Jacques Derrida), and The Cambridge History of South African Literature. His writing is known for its clarity, depth, and ability to bridge close reading with philosophical inquiry, establishing him as a key figure in the fields of poetics, modernism, and literary ethics.