James Joyce and the Matter of Paris

Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of a forthcoming volume titled The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge). She is co-editor with Richard Brown of the James Joyce Quarterly special issue, 'Joycean Avant-Gardes'. Before studying literature, she practiced as an architect in Vienna, Austria, and in Ireland.

• Introduction: the matter of Paris; 1. Paris encountered: 1902–03 writings; 2. Paris recognized: Stephen Hero and Portrait; 3. Paris digested: 'Lestrygonians'; 4. Paris re-envisioned: 'Circe'; 5. Paris profanely illuminated: Joyce's Walter Benjamin; 6. Paris compounded: Finnegans Wake.

'This strikingly original book advances several interrelated arguments about the importance of Paris for understanding Joyce's work. Flynn shows that for Joyce, Paris embodied the spectacle, and the challenges, of the modern city and its burgeoning consumer capitalism.  She argues that Joyce responded to Paris by imagining new ways of thinking through the senses, the body, and materiality generally. This 'sentient thinking', as Flynn articulates it, is both an innovative model of subjectivity and the formulation of an embodied aesthetic. James Joyce and the Matter of Paris departs from the dominant scholarly trends of the last two decades and promises to reshape scholarship on Joyce, modernism, and aesthetics decisively.' Marjorie Howes, Boston College