Timeless Joyce

«In Timeless Joyce, Asun López-Varela offers a holistic, dense, and substantial approach to the study of Ulysses, in commemoration of its publication centenary. The author manages to tackle multiple perspectives that pivot around key aspects of Joyce’s narrative by structuring her account around the spiral figure. This brilliant design makes it possible to include not only detailed thematic studies, but also to recurrently return to the main research lines proposed, in an easy, smooth, and natural way. Especially relevant are the myth cells revisited, with a perceptive method that allows transcendental appreciation without forgetting the language puns, the metaphysical substratum, and the Joycean ironic groundwork.»

(Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz, President of the James Joyce Association of Spain)

«López-Varela’s volume deserves attention not only for the accumulation of new analytical threads but also for the inspiring spiral framework that shows Joyce’s ironic deflective response to the grandiloquent inflation of epic, traditionally performed by myth. The author superbly shows the ambiguities present in Joyce’s mythical method, where the spatial and temporal restrictions proper of the vicissitudes of everyday life are simultaneously parodied and given transcendental scope.»

(José Manuel Losada Goya, President of Asteria, Internacional Association of Mythcriticism)

2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This book is a celebration of Joyce’s text and of the aspects that make his masterpiece timeless. Structured under the inspiration of Brancusi’s spiral image, «Symbol of James Joyce», the volume shows Joyce’s play in two movements: a centripetal move towards unity, using myth, analogies and correspondences and a centrifugal force, with a cunning mixture of irony and unanticipated turns, where the dream of unity is shattered and the text resonates in multiple directions, manifesting its diversity through forms of duplicity and double coding. The double spiral movement of Joyce’s novel is aimed at contrasting diverse perspectives on existential issues as well as religious, political and even gender aspects. Features such as Joyce’s mytho-poetics, the future of nostalgia, temporal becoming, coincidentia oppositorum, apophatic theology and philosophies of the occult are explored as part of an allegorical dimension of myth that simultaneously seeks and refuses holistic unity. Readers are involved in a sort of rite of passage, like Odysseus in his perilous journey, forced to read forwards, backwards and vertically in the fractal structure of the novel through which Joyce achieves its poetics of infinity.

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