Offers new perspectives on two key figures of modernity: James Joyce and Jacques Derrida
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Offers an analysis of maximalism and minimalism as a history of aesthetics, situating their historical theorisation within a modernist genealogy of Joyce and Beckett
Reads Joyce within the context of minimalism, challenging the prevailing critical paradigm of Joyce as maximalist writer
Argues that modernist minimalism has been received as correlate to the inquiry into self-presence in modernity, but that Joyce occupies a continuum with Beckett in this mutual inquiry
This book presents two major critical reorientations, developing new positions on James Joyce and Jacques Derrida by reading them together within a shared modernity. It places these readings in relation to each other through a conceptual history of maximalism and minimalism, situating literature, philosophy and the history of aesthetics within the context of the closure of metaphysics. Through this revised reading of Joyce, Joycean Minimalism, Derridean Maximalism resituates the reception and periodisation of modernism. It also argues that the configuration of modernism and deconstruction it develops demonstrates a shared austerity – one that is located in a mutual philosophical inquiry into self-presence between literature and deconstruction. Overall, Maria-Daniella Dick highlights the contemporaneity of deconstruction in the age of postcritique.
Introduction: ‘Le goût sévère’ 1. James Joyce, Minimalist 2. Jacques Derrida, Maximalist 3. ‘everything + n’: Literature and the Closure 4. 'I was, I was': Dantean Detritus and Late Style 5. A ‘provisionally bygone era’? Deconstruction, Postcritique and Weak Theory
Describing Joyce as a ‘Minimalist’ and Derrida as a ‘Maximalist’, Dick’s wonderfully astute analysis inverts an alternative that splits modernism (Joyce’s maximalism aiming at omnipotence vs. Beckett's minimalism haunted by impotence.) By inserting Derrida’s deconstructive machine, she raises the theoretical stakes and proves that modernism can both remobilize philosophy and keep literature flourishing.
Maria-Daniella Dick is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are in Derrida, Joyce, modern and contemporary literature, and continental philosophy. She has published widely in these areas, on the intersection of international modernism and modernity with continental philosophy and critical theory, and on the comparative and European dimensions of Irish and Scottish culture. She is the co-author of Late Capitalist Freud, with Robbie McLaughlan (2020), and The Derrida Wordbook, with Julian Wolfreys(2013).
