About the Author:
Sean P. Murphy, Associate Professor of English at the College of Lake County (Illinois), has published articles on literary modernism, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, critical theory, and composition theory.

An innovative study that locates Joyce's work in the context of politics and philosophy, James Joyce and Victims elaborates issues central to both modernity and cultural studies--economics, victims, politics, nationality, gender, and modes of knowing--in a way that speaks to the relationships shared by theory and literary texts, culture and the specific products born out of culture. Sean Murphy examines Joyce's response to dominant linguistic and philosophical systems that, because of their inner logics of exclusion, inevitably produce economic, religious, and sexual victims. Drawing on Marx, Freud, Foucault, Girard, and others, Murphy illuminates Joyce's critique of their dialectical theories. By exposing the limits of dominant logical structures, Joyce's texts, from Dubliners (1914) through Ulysses (1922), disclose to readers the extent to which traditional syntax, order, and narrativity contribute to class-based, religious, and gender oppression. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce introduces an alternative, quadratic logic that defies mastery. Essentially, Joyce breaks the cycle of victimage at the level of language at the same time that he exposes the limits and consequences of power, individualism, conceptions of the modern subjectivity, and colonialism.