“all future plunges into the past” – Considerations on Joyce and the Modernist Context

Abstract

Having as its theme the association of Irish novelist James Joyce with the context of modernism, the article has as its main objective discuss how such relation is reflected in Joyce’s work. In order to do so, articulating ideas of Edward Said, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton as theoretical assumptions, the article presents some of the central features of both Anglophone modernism and the background out of which the movement thrived. In addition, based on the perspectives of experts on Joyce’s work such as Richard Ellmann, Donaldo Schüler, and Andrew Gibson, the article explores some general outlines of Joyce’s literature, from his early essayistic texts to his renowned experimental fictional prose, aiming at making explicit the ways in which Joyce’s work reveals a rebellious attitude that combines modernist formal experimentalisms and a clearly antiimperialist impulse.