James Joyce and the Jesuits

Michael Mayo is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His research focuses on the experience of modernity, using psychoanalytic theory to understand how writers used narrative to negotiate the social crises at the turn of the twentieth century. His publications include work on James Joyce, twentieth-century theology, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The disturbed mind; 3. Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle; 4. The labour of reading: Joyce with Klein; 5. Kleinian Aesthetics; 6. Discernment and indifference; 7. It was pitch dark almost; 8. Substantiation; 9. Conclusion: The transference; Bibliography; Index.

'Michael Mayo's lucidly written, patiently reasoned James Joyce and the Jesuits argues that 'Joyce's work addresses itself to particular crises of belief and representation generated by Ignatius of Loyola' in his Spiritual Exercises (1522–1524)… Mayo leaves us with a highly compelling conceptual framework: one that others might well profit from and apply further in their own engagements with the frustrations and enigmas of Joyce's art, and also its playfulness.' James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 123